Trump’s Gold Card
“US steps back from peace talks, saying it won’t mediate between Russia and Ukraine: US State Department warns envoy will stop flying around the world ‘at the drop of a hat.’ Jane Dalton, Independent; Wednesday 30 April 2025;
Quandary: a state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation. as in Trump is in a quandary over Ukraine.
Trump’s frequent feckless campaign boast that “anyone with half a brain could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours” reminds one of the scene in the classic 1962 Sam Spiegel biographical adventure movie Lawrence of Arabia based on the life of T.E. Lawrence. Anthony Quinn as Auda Abu Tayi agrees to attack Aqaba “at his pleasure” but is enticed by Lawrence‘s promise gold is there. Throwing thousands in fistfuls of paper Turkish lira to the wind, he exclaims in shock “He lied! There is no gold in Aqaba! He is NOT perfect!”
The differences between the real T.E. Lawrence and Trump are legion. Col. Lawrence served his country during a war. Trump lied to avoid one. Lawrence was a literate student of Arab culture and history. He lived among Arab tribesmen while researching his Phd on the Crusades. He spoke their language, understood their culture and knew what inspired them. He could quote the Quran in Arabic to King Faisal.
Because of his knowledge Lawrence was able to unite factional Arab tribesmen into a unified force that kept an entire Turkish army pinned down in the Arab peninsula freeing up British troops to fight the main effort in France during World War I.
Trump, on the other hand, has no clue who the Ukrainian people are. He knows nothing of the holodomoric history of that part of the world caused by communist Russia.
Trump knows nothing of Russian history and less than nothing about communism. On the contrary, Trump appears to be a political agnostic with a monomaniacal focus on gold. Putin is equally monomaniacal on restoring the former glory of the massively oppressive Soviet Union. Putin is playing on Trump’s greed like a Stradivarius. Trump is dancing to Putin’s tune and is putting not only Ukraine at risk but the rest of liberated Eastern Europe.
It is Trump’s ignorance of communist ideology (and his failure to listen to anyone who does – like John Bolton) that keeps Trump from “ending the war in 24 hours.”
Well, that and the fact he doesn’t want to piss off Putin to the point he cancels Trump’s Letter of Intent to build Trump Tower: Moscow across the street from the Kremlin.
In this regard, Trump is more like Joe and Hunter Biden than T.E. Lawrence.
“…for the Russians a conciliatory attitude is a sign of weakness. The Russians look on any agreement between them and another country as not having any special or lasting significance.” – Moscow Diary by Velijko Micunic, 1984; 464 pgs.
Even the great “democratic” Russian president Gorbachev portrayed on the cover of Time Magazine as the Man of the Decade and awarded a Nobel Prize for his Glasnost sent Russian tanks to (literally) crush Latvian dissidents protesting at the steps of their Parliament after the fall of the Berlin Wall killing 11 protestors in a move akin to the Chinese government’s massacre at Tianamen Square.
“Let the gullible fools believe you want to perfume your communism with a dab of Western democracy, and they will clothe you in gold.” – Yuri Andropov, Russian president to his protege’ Putin.
“You probably think Mikhail Gorbachev invented the concept of glasnost to describe his effort to lead the Soviet Union “out of its totalitarian state and to democracy, to freedom, to openness. If so, you are not alone. All of the media and most of the “experts” believe it too – as does the committee that awarded Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize. Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica defines glasnost as “Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues. It was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and began the democratization of the Soviet Union”.
Merriam Webster agrees. And the American Heritage Dictionary defines glasnost as “an official policy of the former Soviet government emphasizing candor with regard to discussion of social problems and shortcomings.”
The inconvenient Truth is glasnost is an old Russian term for polishing the ruler’s image. Originally it meant self-promotion. Since the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, all of that country’s leaders have used glasnost to promote themselves inside and outside the country.
In the mid-1930s – half a century before Gorbachev’s glasnost – the official Soviet encyclopedia defined glasnost as a spin on news released to the public – meaning ‘the quality of being made available for public dissemination or manipulation.
Thus, glasnost is regarded as a tool of the black art of dezinformatsiya, and it is used to sanctify the country’s leader.
For communists, only the leader counts. They use glasnost to sanctify their own leaders, and to induce hordes of Western Leftists (and, apparently, Trump) to fall for this scam.” – Disinformation by Ion Pacepa and Professor Ronald J. Rychlak, 2013, 355pgs.
“Criticizing America’s president is as American as apple pie. Portraying him as the enemy of his own country is, however, an un-American phenomenon smuggled into the United States by the KGB disinformation machinery during the Cold War. My department in Romania was one of its’ smugglers.” – Ion Pacepa, Disinformation, p. 352
In English, glasnost’s closest synonym is gaslighting.
Hopefully, Trump will wake up, get a moral compass, see Putin for who he really is and immediately impose the political and economic sanctions against Russia that will strangle Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. If he does, Ukraine will be restored to its’ pre-invasion borders and be free from the genocide Putin is committing against the Ukrainian people.
As it should be.
