Round-up: Trump turns on Zelensky, Musk invades Fort Knox, and war with Mexico?

Another week in Trumpworld

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Trump vs. Zelensky

Trump said some shocking things about Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky this week. He said that he is to blame for starting the war and that he is a dictator. He added that he may shortly have no country left.

I think three different things are going on here. The first is that this is just what Trump and his right-wing media bubble believes. In fact, I’m shocked at the fact that anyone is shocked by Trump saying these things.

Zelensky has long been portrayed on Fox News as a conman who convinced a sleepy Biden administration to give away vast quantities of U.S. money and weaponry. Tucker Carlson has been calling Zelensky a “dictator” for years. Just weeks after the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Elon Musk was posting memes like the one below portraying anyone who supported Ukraine as a mindless sheep transfixed by the latest liberal orthodoxy. All of these people have a history of parroting Russian propaganda directly, as does Trump himself. Remember when he stood next to Putin in 2018 and said that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 election?

Elon Musk and other MAGA figures have been posting memes like this for years

It’s extremely important to understand that Trump doesn’t say these things as a negotiating tactic, but rather because he really believes them. In 2019, during the “perfect phone call” with Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment, the U.S. president pressured Zelensky to hand over Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which according to a MAGAverse conspiracy theory was physically present in Ukraine. So Trump is saying this stuff in private too. It’s just who he is.

Secondly, Trump is lashing out at Zelensky because he refused to hand over a vast chunk of Ukraine’s natural resources. The president wants Zelensky to provide compensation to the U.S. for all of its support over the last few years, and he reportedly presented Zelensky with a plan that would give the U.S. access to 50% of the country’s minerals. Zelensky has reacted badly to the plan, and particularly to being required to sign it so quickly and without receiving any future security guarantees from the United States in return.

The general idea behind this plan seems to be the product of some well-meaning Republicans. Senator Lindsay Graham, one of the architects of the proposal, seems to think that the best way to get Trump to believe that Ukraine is worth defending is to ensure that the U.S. has some direct economic stake in its continued independence.

If such a plan could get the “America First” crew behind the continued defense of Ukraine at a minimal cost to its sovereignty and economy, that might be worth pursuing. But the speed and scale of the Trump administration’s demand is obviously too much. Things like this need to be decided as part of the final agreement, not in a shotgun wedding now. But Trump is impatient and incompetent, so he’s trying to coerce Kyiv into folding now.

The final thing that’s going on is that Zelensky and Trump are feeling each other out publicly. After some of Trump’s remarks, Zelensky hit back and said that Trump was living in “disinformation space”. Trump cannot handle public criticism, and so he dramatically escalated his attacks in return.

Zelensky is in a real bind here. For the sake of his domestic politics, he needs to stand up for Ukraine and hit back. But when J.D. Vance says that publicly criticizing Trump is a counterproductive way to deal with him, he’s actually got a point. Trump hates criticism and reacts badly to it. And at the end of the day, Trump is the U.S. president, and the future of Zelensky’s country depends on staying on his good side, even if that means taking lots of punches along the way. That is the real tragedy of Zelensky’s position, and I fear it’s not one that he can escape from.

Gold, precious gold!

Here’s a weird one. This week, Trump and Elon Musk have vowed to visit Fort Knox “to make sure the gold is there”. In case you don’t know, Fort Knox is where the U.S. government keeps its reserves of gold bullion. (Actually, the United States Bullion Depository, as it’s called, is next to the Army base called Fort Knox, but everyone calls it “Fort Knox” anyway).

At first glance, this seems like a ludicrous story, or perhaps a sign that Trump has recently watched the movie Goldfinger. But I think if you dig a little deeper, there’s a lesson here about how Trump harms himself politically by existing in the right-wing media bubble.

Fort Knox is very secure - there’s nearly $300bn worth of gold there! - and has only been visited by outsiders three times. The only president to ever go there was Franklin Roosevelt, and it was another 30 years before the next visit, by Treasury Secretary William Simon, who led an audit of the sort that Trump is now calling for. Then in 2017, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin visited for what appears to have been some random sightseeing and got in trouble for it.

The reason Trump and Musk are making a stink about visiting now is because of right wing conspiracy theories. Right-wing influencers like Alex Jones love to claim that the reason the public is not allowed into Fort Knox is because the gold is not actually there. Musk, who is in about the 98th percentile of gullibility when encountering random things on social media, is now echoing this claim, saying: “Who is confirming that gold wasn’t stolen from Fort Knox? Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not.”

The answer to “who is confirming that the gold wasn’t stolen” is, of course, the various agencies of the U.S. government in charge of it. But according to the logic of MAGAworld, lifelong civil servants are less trustworthy than random businesspeople and their 19-year-old assistants, so now we need some sort of Musk-led audit.

On the one hand, this is part of a fascinating pattern I’m noticing whereby Musk discovers something that anyone knowledgeable about the U.S. government already knows, and reacts to it as if it’s some novel mystery which demands an explanation.

On the other hand, it’s a sign of how Trump and the people around him respond to cues from far-right social media sources. They develop obsessions and infatuations which make no sense to the 95% of Americans who are not in the same social media bubble. Trump suffered from this a lot in his first administration - his phone call to Zelensky about Clinton’s email server, mentioned above, was a prime example. Things like this are why Trump’s polls are doing so badly after his first weeks in office. Maybe he ought to focus on inflation instead.

War with Mexico

The idea of waging war on Mexico to “solve” America’s drug problem has become surprisingly common in conservative circles in the U.S. Republican Congressmen have been discussing it for years. As I wrote nearly two years ago, this would be a really bad idea: