If Trump Was Still President When Ukraine Was Invaded...
A glimpse of the alternative reality in which Biden lost in 2020
I want to remind you of what would be happening with Ukraine and Russia if Biden hadn’t won the last election:
When Putin masses troops on the Ukrainian border the Trump White House rubber-stamps Russian propaganda denying it. Trump ends all Ukrainian assistance because Zelensky “is a mean, nasty guy” that the “Biden crime family” colluded with to be a #NeverTrumper, and he refuses to commit to defending a very concerned Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia despite our sacred NATO Article 5 oath.
When Putin invades, Trump calls Putin a clever genius, and says he trusts Putin over the unanimous confirmations of the military and national security apparatus that Russia is committing war crimes. In a press conference Trump claims “lots of people are saying the Ukraine government is filled with Nazis,” and Kayleigh McEnany adds that no one in history has defended democracy more than Trump. When the Russian military has the same problems it’s having now, Trump agrees to send arms, food supplies, and fuel to Russia. Trump signs a one-sided trade deal with Belarus’s Lukashenko for a quick photo-op, and publicly admires his strength in killing so many Belarusians during his putdown of the recent protests. Trump tells Tucker Carlson in a fawning interview that America does terrible things too.
Trump then horrifies the State Department by blackmailing Moldova, who fears that its next on Putin’s invasion list, to find some dirt on Nancy Pelosi if it wants any more US aid money. Trump withdraws all funding from NATO because France and Britain are “ripping us off,” and tells Germany that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will make Germany Great Again. Then, through shell companies, the Trump Organization gets suspicious bank loans from Russian oligarchs who are suddenly very interested in the profitability of his failing golf courses.
Meanwhile, Ukraine fights alone, and Trump sends Mike Pompeo to Lviv to tell Ukrainians to give up, which Fox News celebrates with two weeks of nonstop media coverage demanding Trump get the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the war. Somewhere in this timeline Susan Collins says she’s troubled, but does nothing, and Lindsey Graham reverses himself from his previous valid criticisms of Russia after he travels to Moscow and golfs with Putin.
Thankfully Biden won the last election, and is president instead of Trump. Let’s go over Biden’s report card as president so far:
Biden gaffe alert! He said in Europe yesterday about Vladimir Putin, “For God's sake this man cannot remain in power.” I’m not sure Biden hoped the immediate response to his speech would focus primarily on whether or not he intends to enforce regime change upon Russia, so it’s a bit of an unforced error regarding his words’ reception, but—say what you will about Biden’s gaffes—at least they’re typically from Biden saying something objectively and morally true, just things momentarily politically awkward to say.
The media can spin his words all weekend for controversy, clicks and soundbites, but it’s true that Putin has objectively lost the proverbial mandate of Heaven after erasing decades of Russian growth and European peace with his blatantly self-destructive miscalculation to invade Ukraine and commit a plethora of humanitarian and war crimes. Putin has also admitted himself into the club of historic psychopaths, and has taken the early lead in the 21st Century’s bracket.
Biden’s statement also very well could quickly be validated as prophesy if his notion that Russia and its national interests are being betrayed by Putin helps inspire Russian citizens to protest en masse and orchestrate some bureaucratic removal of Putin from office, or helps motivate some military official or disgruntled oligarch to murder Putin to forestall the obviously coming purge of scapegoated military officials, governmental bureaucrats, media figures, and regular citizens Putin will accuse of treason in order to point the finger for the failed Ukrainian invasion at everyone but himself. A blood-thirsty domestic purge of alleged enemies of the state by a vengeful autocrat following an international humiliation is unfortunately something with which Russian history is very familiar, and the officials and advisers around Putin would be doing themselves a self-preservation favor by pulling off a coup. If I were Putin, I’d get even longer tables to sit at for all my future meetings.
Since Putin just murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians in a mid-dictatorship crisis to make up for self-conscious fears about his personal legacy, he’s obviously not going to willingly resign in disgrace. He’s a cornered, wounded animal, and he undoubtedly knows more than anyone else he must stay in power by any means possible if he wants to continue living. After twenty years of using the state to murderously squash any legitimate opposition and steal the nation's wealth, his successor, while consolidating power in the post-Putin vacuum, will not be interested in just letting Putin quietly retire to his big mansion.
Ultimately for Biden, his “For God's sake this man cannot remain in power” statement is not that politically inconvenient for the West and anti-Putin Russians since the entire world’s weekend debate is premised on the reality that most of the globe agrees Putin 100% deserves to be forcefully evicted from office. Let’s call it psychological warfare against Putin for now.
Biden’s domestic approval ratings are continuing to drop, even though there is record unemployment (the US added 6.5 million jobs in 2021, the most ever in a single year) that’s conspicuously better than the unemployment ratings Trump bragged about virtually every day and for which the media regularly congratulated him. Biden is also getting blamed for high gas prices, even though gas prices are higher in Europe and Biden, of course, has no personal control over what price international oil companies choose to sell their manipulated supply at while operating like a cartel in bad faith to prevent free market competition and essentially rob average consumers at the gas pump.
Biden is also being blamed for the global inflation problems still raging from the COVID-related supply chain problems, and the media is playing up its “tough on both sides” schtick despite never actually being tough on Trump for almost any economic matters. Meanwhile, the stock market is continuing to go up, higher than the Trump years—which inherited the economy Obama painstakingly brought back from the Republican-pushed brink of catastrophic meltdown—but stock market gains apparently only earn Republican presidents praise.
Other Biden victories include a major bipartisan infrastructure plan that eluded Trump for four years; a hugely successful COVID relief plan that prevented mass evictions, bankruptcy, child hunger, and poverty; a major overhaul of the US Postal Service that got very little media coverage even though it’ll prevent the USPS from going insolvent in the next two years; an American society increasingly operating at a post-COVID normal; the most federal judges appointed in a president’s first year since Reagan as well as the most diverse ever with 80% being women and 53% being people of color; and very soon the first Black female Supreme Court justice in history.
Biden is also gearing up for passing a new, Manchin-pre-approved iteration of his previous Build Back Better plan, and should definitely forgive some quantity of student debts to help Democrats boost voter turnout in the midterms. Unfortunately, Republicans’ rabidly partisan media monopoly on conservative attention, pavlovian hyper-partisan opposition to anything Democrats propose, and absurdist short-term opportunism to turn any and every current event no matter how small and insignificant into an existentially persecution-complexed culture war battle will always be louder than the quietly professional, stable governance Joe Biden is executing.
Biden’s approval ratings (and America’s) abroad are rising thanks to his global leadership. Unfortunately, he’s taking a hit on the Left by pundits and foreign policy empaths who think he should be doing much more to directly intervene and crush the Russian military. Such military strategizing may sound bold and courageous, but armchair tacticians can fantasize about a no-fly zone or a NATO adventure into Ukraine without being personally responsible for the consequences of such actions.
That’s a luxury Biden does not have because the buck stops with him. He must thread the needle between helping Ukraine preserve its sovereignty and protecting global liberal democracy while not risking tens of millions of human lives in Eastern Europe or even America in the event Putin would act on his threat to escalate the war into a nuclear exchange. There have been weeks of debate on whether Putin is a rational actor who would actually use nukes or perhaps chemical weapons, but Biden’s calculus obviously cannot responsibly rule it out.
Fortunately, media reports appear to suggest Putin is directing a Russian propaganda campaign to pretend the invasion push around Kiev was just a feint to disorient Ukrainian defense efforts in the eastern Donbass region that Putin is currently trying to annex. This is an obvious lie to mask how disastrous the Kiev invasion attempt has gone thanks to a humiliating performance by a Russian military showing clear signs of kleptocratic mismanagement, dismal troop morale, and truly embarrassing logistical failures, but the moving of goalposts amidst a crumbling offensive does suggest a downscaling of Putin’s empire hopes. This means there will soon be less room for some kind of escalatory accident, such as a Russian missile landing over the Ukrainian border into Poland, or an impulsive chemical attack in a Kiev suburb that crosses a new line and forces some retaliatory NATO action.
Thankfully Biden appears very aware that direct intervention would be a gift to Putin, who could then spin the war into a righteous fight against evil American hegemony and Western suffocation of Russian security instead of the absurdly unnecessary and unpopular murder of Russia’s “brothers and sisters” that it is.
The real victory here is the economic sanctions Biden defied expectations in uniting so many disparate European governments and economic interests to enforce against Putin’s war-making capabilities. Russia’s economy and Ruble are tanking, the government has lost access to about half of its foreign currency reserve assets, imports and exports have been economically nuked, and Russia is poised to go deep into debt amidst a spiral of defaults unless Putin can either convince China to buys billions of worthless Russian bonds by offering a frightening interest rate or direct Russia’s central bank to print new money so the Russian people have to take wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread.
Thanks, Biden, for your calm leadership!
Thanks for your eyeball attention!
-Dash MacIntyre
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