The Abandonment of History
Scott Montgomery tries and fails to connect Trump to his predecessors.
Donald Trump has handed every ally of the U.S. the wrong end of a burning torch. His embrace of Russia goes so far beyond mere encouragement for Putin to enter peace negotiations that it verges on the opposite: each week, despite continued attacks on Ukraine, more gifts arrive from Washington. Siding with the Kremlin at the UN, followed by a halt to all cyberoperations against Russia, were a nice beginning. But the best was yet to come—a media spectacle in which Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, sought to humiliate Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky before the entire world.
Nothing that Trump said in his following address to the U.S. Congress on March 4, nor in what may happen with the “deal” over Ukraine’s minerals, will alter the pivotal moment that this crude spectacle revealed. During that White House meeting on February 28, before reporters and tv cameras, Trump and his canine VP unleashed an astonishing, juvenile tantrum against Zelensky, who had come to America with the good faith hope of an agreement that would help set up a ceasefire. Only a few days later, Trump cancelled all military aid to Ukraine—something he cannot legally do, as Congress has authority over such aid—and then cut off all intelligence sharing as well. This was done after Zelensky sought to mend things by expressing repeatedly in public his country’s profound debt to the U.S. and sending a letter of attempted reconciliation to the White House. The U.S. President effectively spat on all of it.
However foolish and damaging, Trump’s admiration for Putin is as genuine as his disrespect for Zelensky. His rant about Putin going “through a hell of a lot with me” allows no skepticism regarding who’s side he’s on. This man, who is doing more than any other to make the world a more dangerous, untethered place, felt he could lecture the leader of an invaded, brutalized nation about “risking World War III.” No less, in the days immediately following, he gifted his comrade in the Kremlin what amounted to an assault on Ukraine by stripping away aid and intelligence
Eighty years of U.S. foreign policy is now dead. The fact has been resisted for a while by Europe, Japan, South Korea and some others. But short of a miracle, it will become clarion to all soon enough. Kind hearts and coronets are no more likely to persuade Trump than Putin. Europe, it appears, finally knows it can no longer afford to indulge in magical thinking. Chides and demands, richly seasoned with contempt and threat, are what it can expect from Trump. Leaders have opened discussion about their own nuclear umbrella, starting with extended deterrence from France and the UK. Such would be a beginning, but a beginning only. Russia has more than 10 times the number of nuclear weapons that those two countries possess.
At this point, we should expect Trump to escalate. Each new outrage of his has routinely been a step to the next. His bullying wrath—he came close to assaulting Zelensky physically—suggests he might propose something as unhinged as switching U.S. military and financial support to Russia. This could be done overtly or secretly, as Reagan did in the Iran-Contra affair, explained as a strategy to bring the conflict to a swifter end.
Trump categorically denies that Putin is a bad actor on the world stage. While it staggers one to imagine what must be ignored, warped, erased, and distorted for such an understanding to be possible, Trump has managed it quite well. The list of Putin’s crimes against his own people and society is miles-long; against former Soviet republics that he’s invaded, Ukraine most of all, against peace, freedom, and dissent, it is immeasurable. That there are significant numbers anywhere in the West who admire him is disturbing enough. That a U.S. president does so in broad daylight, cameras rolling, with barely a pant of protest from his own party, leaves one with little choice but to realize a perverse kind rationality is now operating at the helm.
Many commentators have called this “transactional.” As a businessman, Trump is said to view everything he does, every decision he makes, as a “deal,” in which he seeks to get the better end of the bargain. It is an intelligent (if obvious) view of how his mind works and may indeed have some truth. But as a guide to past and future events, it is misleading and even wrong.
Trump is not imposing a cold and brutal will on the U.S., its allies, and Ukraine for performance’s sake. Unlike his mercenary VP, his actions are not really meant to attract the accolades of his supporters (though he might hope for such happy attention, as well as from Putin and his ilk). He is working, at base, for himself.
Like most autocrats, Trump is subject to the perverse enchantments of power, the amoral forces of authority he can wield over people, institutions, nations, history. He feels that he has broken free of the native constraints and pusillanimous rules with which American democracy has burdened itself and in which his opponents and would-be opponents are deeply invested. We don’t often talk about this side of authoritarianism any longer, not as was common in the wake of WWII. But perhaps we should.
It is unfortunate, I think, that so few of the generation who fought and won WWII now remain. Ordinary and heroic, they made possible the Long Peace of the past 80 years—eight full decades without a single war between major powers, far surpassing the achievement by the Concert of Europe, which, in 1815, sought international stability after the Napoleonic Wars, yet was dashed to pieces by the Austro-and Franco-Prussian wars of 1866 and 1871. As for the millions who perished fighting against Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, America’s president in 2025 disgraces their memory by rejecting what they died to preserve and create. That he invoked their sacrifice in his absurdly self-elevated monologue to Congress on March 4 doubled the insult.
Putin at least can say he stands tall in a long line leading back to Stalin and Lenin; Donald Trump has made himself the very nemesis of FDR, JFK, and Lincoln. Little need be said about his disavowal of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, et al. Under his presidency and with the support of a servile Republican Party, America has now approached the abandonment of its history.
Photo by Tara Winstead
