The Unvarnished Ignorant Bully Was on Display for All to See
The whole world has now seen the Trump I know. Watching his Oval Office attack on Ukraine President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, felt just like some of my many one-on-one meetings with Donald.
In his dotage, Donald remains an 8th-grade bully demanding submission to his will under threat of reprisal, legal in my case, violent for the Ukrainian people.
Watching Vice President JD Vance demand that Zelenskyy grovel was despicable, akin to a tyrannical king demanding that a starving subject dance for a piece of bread.
A significant change from my interviews with Donald is that he used to be able to string together complete sentences, even if he made up the facts. He has trouble forming more than a phrase, but he is often fact-free. A second disturbing change is that he has made America the ally of Vladimir Putin, the murderous modern Tsar.
To Donald might makes right, as his shameful Oval Office performance showed.
Nothing is more threatening to Donald than exposing how appallingly ignorant he is and how he creates his own reality without regard to indisputable facts that show he is lying. The only rival threat is showing that much of his wealth is illusory.
When confronted with facts and truths Donald wants to wish away, his core strategy is not answering the question, lying, and shifting to some irrelevancy. That gives him comfort. It’s analogous to people who, under stress, start quietly singing a song, a form of self-soothing.
Trump lacks the inner emotional, intellectual, or psychological core to debate. Donald’s an empty vessel, his soul killed by the monster who was his money-grubbing father and his cold and distant mother. Cruelty for profit and the sake of cruelty was one of Fred Trump’s core values.
When Donald can’t slither away from reality, his feral side emerges. Shouting down Zelenskyy while ignoring what the Ukrainian president said—expressing thanks just as JD Vance rudely demanded—is so very Donald. Indeed, Trump spoke over Zelenskyy when he invoked god.
The world also saw Trump lie and lie again.
Trump repeatedly said that America has given Ukraine $350 billion. That’s not just a lie. It’s a Trumpian whopper.
For days, Trump employed that figure, almost triple the actual support – just under $120 billion.
Even if you count the roughly $60 billion more in military aid that the Biden administration promised—but Trump may never deliver—Trump’s number is double reality.
And it’s not “money” as Trump keeps saying. The aid comes in the form of war materiel, with every piece of artillery, every gun, and every bullet made in America. Think of it as an American jobs program, a manufacturing jobs program.
Shutting down aid to Ukraine will only add to the coming recession caused by Trump illegally firing a large swath of the federal government workforce and terminating research grants (effectively throwing away many taxpayer investments in promising cancer research and other advances in science).
This fits perfectly with Trump’s claims of being worth billions (imaginary), being one of Gotham’s top five developers (not even close), his playing scratch golf (true if you scratch lies on your scorecard), and being THE world expert on 22 different subjects.
To Donald, reality is not what mature adults know. Little things like facts matter, but not to Donald unless they advance his desires and interests.
The great expert on authoritarian regimes, Yale Professor, Timothy Snyder, offers a variation of my “creates his own reality” line: Trump lives in a fictional world in his head, which is why he can change the narrative as needed.
Watch the entire video and you will see that Trump and Vance, his highly educated attack dog, wouldn’t let Zelenskyy respond. They also ignored that when Vance asked for a statement of thanks to the Trump administration that Zelensky delivered. They just continued rudely shouting Zelenskyy down.
Surprisingly, Zelenskyy lost his Obama-like cool. I say surprisingly because Zelenskyy was a successful standup comedian, a job where only the very quick and bright prosper.
Staying silent during the shameful attack by Trump and Vance would have been a more thoughtful and more effective response. However, as American co-president Elon Musk likes to say, mistakes will be made.
If you know anyone who believes Trump’s lie that he was a superior student (no record exists supporting this, unlike the lists of honor roll students published by schools and universities), point them to the words of Penn marketing Professor William T. Kelley, who taught Trump. Well, who tried to teach Trump.
Donald was “the dumbest goddam student I ever had,” Kelley often said before he died in 1982 when Trump was a little-known figure even in Manhattan. Kelley would emphasize the expletive and “ever.”
Fellow students have told me over the years that they rarely saw Trump. Women he asked out described him as a “creep.” I asked one Penn woman who agreed to a dinner date whether intimacy followed. Her answer: “The date ended early.”
In his mind and public comments, however, Donald is a Don Juan, indeed THE Don Juan of our era. But no young woman in Manhattan, infused with young women looking for a rich husband, would submit to him, forcing Donald to marry a hard-drinking department store runway model in Canada.
Now that you have seen the unvarnished Donald the ignorant bully, apply what you know as a lens to focus your understanding of everything he does.
2 Comments
Chas Freeman is a highly accomplished diplomat. He interpreted for Nixon and Kissinger during the China visit in 72. He was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, assistant secretary of defense, and President Barack Obama’s selection to head the National Intelligence Council. His extremely well informed view suggests you are repeating falsehoods and propaganda, as summarized in the first two minutes of this video.
https://youtu.be/OaMKPSWLmRE?si=ssIMOAr7C_YRtppT
I value your work highly and am curious how you might respond to what Freeman says.
Mr Johnston, i see that you read Timothy Snyder. Did you see his recent opinion that the Zelensky slap down was a classic anti-semitic performance? What do you think?