Over the weekend I tried to think of another time in our history when our president publicly excoriated one of our allies for his losses on the battlefield in an ongoing war, in fact telling him that his country was losing. Not only could I not think of it happening in our own country, I couldn't think of a time when such a thing happened in the rest of the world.
I'm speaking of the disgusting display in the Oval Office last Friday when Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, whose professed belief in the Christian religion might lead you to think that he would have some sensitivity to the idea of being charitable to others, sat there surrounded by Republican sycophants and the stenographers of the national media, and laid into the beleaguered president of Ukraine as if he were not an ally but an enemy of the United States. I'm not going to quote from the lies and Russian propaganda repeated by the president and his vice president, because that's what they want us to do. The mainstream media called the televised event an ambush, and although I was reluctant to agree with them at the time it happened, I have since come around in the way I look at it.
The audience for the invective they hurled wasn’t President Volodymyr Zelensky, its putative target. It was instead Vladimir Putin, thousands of miles away, and the MAGA faithful watching their televisions, perma-tuned to Fox News. They weren't trying to get the president of Ukraine to go along with their insane fantasies, other than Trump's obsession with making a “deal” for Ukraine’s rare metal treasures.
Trump was back at it on Monday, with a full court press on Zelensky to come back to the table. He had his national security adviser, Mike Waltz on Fox News telling Zelensky to “express regret” in order to get back on Trump's good side. "The American people's patience is not unlimited, their wallets are not unlimited, and our stockpiles and munitions are not unlimited," Waltz threatened. "So the time to talk is now."
Trump himself chaired a meeting at the White House with Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and of course his lap puppy Vance, where he decided to “suspend” military aid to Ukraine. He also held a press availability to personally put pressure on Zelensky. After what we saw in the Oval Office on Friday, it seemed a turn around for Trump. He went on and on about how terrible it is that tens of thousands, no “hundreds of thousands of boys” are dying over there. Trump has made no secret of his affection and closeness to Vladimir Putin. He could pick up the phone tonight and call Putin and put the pressure where it belongs, on the president of Russia who has prosecuted three years of aggression against Ukraine, and urge him to stop the killing.
We know that Trump doesn't give a shit how many “boys” are dying in Ukraine. So, what does he care about?
Somebody has whispered in Trump's ear about Ukraine’s riches in rare metals. We don't know who did the whispering -- it could have been Elon Musk, or Sam Altman, both of whom have billions in holdings in their artificial intelligence companies, xAI and OpenAI, but somebody did. Bloomberg, whose business it is to pay attention to business, not international relations or wars, got it right on Trump's recent statements about Ukraine: “Trump Doesn’t Think Ukraine Minerals Deal is Dead.”
Don't you think that's a little peculiar? The Oval Office clusterfuck on Friday and the White House meeting today were supposedly about ending the war in Ukraine. But two days later a different picture has emerged. Ending that war isn’t about stopping the violence and the body count of “dead boys” Trump professes to be so concerned about. It's about the mineral deal with Ukraine.
Trillions will be made on the rare earth minerals essential for the next growth spurt in technology, artificial intelligence, and Trump wants a piece of the action. His credo, for the entirety of his life, has been: What's in it for me? He has made it clear he realizes that he made a mistake the first time around as president. He didn't take enough for himself. He's not going to make that mistake this time. The president is not subject to the ethics rules that control everyone else in the government, and his Supreme Court has given him a get out of jail free card to do whatever he wants while he's in office.
Trump wants a deal with Zelensky for the rights to Ukraine's rare earth minerals. Not only will such a deal put billions in the pockets of his buddies Musk and Altman, he has clearly figured a way to put billions in his own pockets. Probably the only person who understands why Trump is trying so hard to end the war in Ukraine is the man who started it, his pal Putin, who knows only too well the riches that have existed under the ground across his border in Ukraine. He wants them as badly as Trump does, which is why he hasn't just thrown up his arms and said let's get this thing over with.
It's why he is spending the lives of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of billions in military equipment that he's running out of to take incrementally smaller and smaller pieces of the Donbass in what are beginning to look like the waning days of the war. Why else sacrifice so much blood and treasure for such small gains?
Like every other war in history, it turns out that this one is all about money. If Putin were to take Ukraine, he would have yet another natural resource to sell on the world market. Natural resources are the entirety of Russia's economy. Their oil and gas is increasingly more difficult to extract, but Putin knows that all you have to do to get rare minerals is dig them out of the ground.
Both Trump and Putin are avaricious to the bottoms of their black little souls. Putin built himself a 200,000 square foot mansion in Crimea, and he has made himself president for life of Russia. Donald Trump just announced that he wants to build a ballroom “just like Mar-a-Lago” in the White House, and has been dangling the possibility of running for a third term in front of his MAGA faithful every chance he gets.
Donald Trump's favorite thing about being president is that walk he takes across the South Lawn of the White House to his waiting helicopter that takes him to his waiting Air Force One that flies him down to Mar-a-Lago to play golf and bathe in the adulation of his club members who gather around him on the patio as he chows down on his well-done steak and quaffs Diet Coke. Lately he permitted someone to leak his impatience with the progress Boeing is making to supply him with a new Air Force One. He is reportedly toying with the idea of buying a used gold-plated aircraft from Qatar or some other gulf state and retrofitting it into an Air Force One more befitting the potentate he sees himself as.
Trump is even reported to take informal polls of those flying with him to Florida asking them which aircraft they like better: his own gold-plated 757 he calls Trump Force One, or the plain vanilla craft supplied to him by the federal government, Air Force One. His minions vote reliably for his garish private plane.
Trump is in love with with the trappings of office because they don’t cost him a cent, and as ever, he's obsessed with measuring who has the biggest dick in billions.
It turns out that the real reason Trump and Vance belittled and pressured Zelensky on Friday was so that Donald Trump can get even richer than he already is. His anger at the president of Ukraine isn't that he wasn't obsequious enough, although that would have helped, but that he won't agree to a deal fast enough.
I told you it was worse than you thought.
