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Q&A about Trump and Russia

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Every US administration since 1991 has tried a Russia reset. Every single one. The idea seems to be that it’s possible to make Russians peaceful by being nice to them. Every single effort in this direction ended up with Russians getting ever angrier and invading somebody. Yet every new US administration does the exact same thing as the previous one and hopes for a different result.

Trump is doing exactly what Obama did with his Hillary-led Russia reset. And what GW Bush did with his. And what Bill Clinton and Bush Sr did. Why does he want to repeat the same failed policies of every single one of his predecessors of the past 3 decades? Because the American political establishment is senile. There are no fresh brains, no interesting ideas. Nobody has the energy to try something new or even to conclude that something new is possible.

I predicted that Trump was going to try another Russia reset and would make friendly overtures to Putin. I also predicted Putin would spit in his face. It was easy for me to predict all this not because I’m some sort of a clairvoyant but because it’s exactly what happens every single time. A monkey would be able to figure this out after 3 decades of repetition.

What I didn’t predict was that Trump would eat up Putin’s mockery and pretend it didn’t happen. I misjudged Trump’s age and energy level. I tend to want to be optimistic, and while often a great trait, it can also lead to mistaken judgment. I was hoping Trump would surprise me by being different from every preceding US president. In this specific area, he didn’t. He’s still obviously enormously better than Kamala but we are still stuck with the same old foreign policy of the US being obsessed with the Middle East and dumb about everywhere else.

46 responses to “Q&A about Trump and Russia”

  1. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    Science being destroyed in the name of…I’m not even sure what

    https://x.com/MungoManic/status/1901098288037642552

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Australians are very far gone. I avoid all news about them because it’s all depressing.

      Like

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    2. oldcowboy3 Avatar
      oldcowboy3

      Yes, the same insane desperate effort to hide anything that might undermine the beliefs of the current first peoples ;-D

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  2. ed Avatar
    ed

    So far I’m also very disappointed with Trump when it comes to his dealing with Russian. During his first term he at least took action clearly aimed at limiting Russia’s economy and power, but all I see now is MAGA gushing from all sides about how good and strong Putin is because he’s anti-woke and anti-liberal.

    The thing about MAGA is it seems all they care about is anti-woke, and “screwing the libs.” It’s just so stupid to base our entire foreign policy on such stupidity.

    There is also the idea that they want to get Russia on our side to counter China. The depths of ineptitude and stupidity to even thing that’s going to happen is just unfathomable to me.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Unfortunately, the undisciplined, stupid people are holding sway with Republicans, just like they did with the Dems. The most hysterical, slobbering, and downright moronic wing of each party is in control of both of them. Normal people, in the meantime, are observing the circus with disappointment and sadness.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Here is yet another example of Trump team’s incompetence:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/24/hegseth-national-security-group-chat-atlantic-reaction-00244983

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Político is a propaganda outlet. You are allowing dishonest, terrible propagandists to exploit you by polluting your brain. Why do you do something like this?

      I can’t begin to comprehend this.

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      1. Someone Avatar
        Someone

        This is on all major news networks and the Trump administration has confirmed it. I’m sorry that you have been so traumatized by propaganda and the complexity of modern life and information that you have to resort to this approach.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I don’t know what the “it” is. I don’t read Político.

          Are you the same person who keep asking about “rights”? The wounded poutiness vibe is very similar.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        This is just a source that came up at the top of the search. I don’t usually read Politico. Here is the first source I read it at:

        https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-world/3974333-the-atlantic-administracia-trampa-vipadkovo-dodala-zurnalista-do-sekretnogo-catu-pro-vijskovi-operacii.html

        Would that work?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I’m very disturbed that the foreign policy of the Obama administration continues. Obama has out of office for a decade, and we are still waging war in the Middle East and resetting with Russia. I don’t know what it will take to change that.

          Yes, very upsetting.

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          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            I don’t think that there is anything that will change the current administration’s foreign policy, unfortunately. I assume you’ve heard/read about the recent interview Steve Witkoff gave Tucker Carlson. Witkoff is Trump’s representative, so I think he’s voicing Trump’s real opinion about Russia and Ukraine. Trump views Putin and Xi as his equals and everyone else as inferior to them, so he treats all other countries accordingly.

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              It’s not the current administration’s policy. It’s every administration’s policy. They all crawl on all fours for Russia and wage war in the Middle East. Always the same thing. I have no idea what needs to happen for this to change.

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              1. cliff arroyo Avatar
                cliff arroyo

                “It’s every administration’s”

                Trump one was different. No new wars and a tougher line toward russia…. and now he’s back to US type crawling on his belly to appease Israel and russia and lobbing bombs in the Middle East….

                Liked by 1 person

              2. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                I know! That’s why I was hopeful we’d see good foreign policy this time around. But instead, it’s Obama all over again.

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              3. Avatar
                Anonymous

                It may look like it’s the same policy as the previous administrations, but the motivation is different. If you read some of the conversation of this now infamous chat, you’d notice that the main motivation is money. The U.S. doesn’t benefit much from opening up the channel but Europe does. Vance and co. are more interested in “getting paid” by Europe (I’m paraphrasing here) than by any direct American interest. So if you keep in mind that everything Trump does is about money, his actions will make more sense, even if any intelligent person will understand that this is a losing strategy. Trump is not a skilled politician when it comes to foreign policy. He doesn’t understand other countries and how to work with them. He lives in the past- he thinks the best time in America economically was between 1870 and 1913 and is obsessed with tariffs. He truly believes that Canada is meant to be the American state, so when he continues to spew this nonsense, it’s not trolling. He surrounded himself with ideologues who have no experience in the areas they were placed to oversee and are out of their depth. We have to accept that we are now stuck with this for the next four years if we can survive them.

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              4. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                And Bush invaded Iraq not because of money? Why, then?

                Liked by 1 person

  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Here is the original article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/?gift=kPTlqn0J1iP9IBZcsdI5IVJpB2t9BYyxpzU4sooa69M&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

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  5. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    Regarding the leak…. there are already some saying it was likely planned, which was my first thought. if it was, I’m assuming the purpose was similar to the oval office kayfabe which was at least partially about making soft doughboy Vance seem tough. It’s not working as he still comes across as unmotivatedly aggrieved about everything and snippy rather than macho… a bully’s toady and not a force to be reckoned with.

    The second thought was that if it was real it does signal an alarming level of real basic incompetence at the top. When you vote for ‘outsiders’ you’re voting for people who don’t know how to get things done or who were excluded for a reason (like extreme unreliability as manifested in leaks of this kind).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      What’s disturbing is Vance’s obsessive hostility towards Europe. I can’t explain it other than as influence of his anti-colonialist woke wife. Nothing else explains such a weird fixation.

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      1. Hugo Avatar
        Hugo

        Isn’t it similar to Trump’s policy/verbiage on Europe? There is the financial dimension. Trump has said numerous times that they’re not contributing enough money towards their defense and US won’t bail them out militarily anymore (de facto exiting NATO). This is exactly the same – saying that Europe is counting on US to do things militarily for them (to clear shipping lanes).

        There is also the cultural MAGA hostility towards Europe. They dislike that it’s importing migrants from the Middle East and North Africa that are overrunning it and not contributing (what you’ve experienced on your trip), that Europeans don’t have freedom of speech and jail people for social media posts. Essentially Vance’s speech in Munich.

        I don’t think Vance is obsessively hostile towards Europe. He just reflects his party’s views.

        If it was his wife’s influence, wouldn’t he be talking about colonialism and imperialism? Instead they’re essentially trying to colonize Greenland.

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    2. Avatar
      Anonymous

      I don’t think it was planned based on Hegseth’s reply to a journalist’s question about it. Instead of answering a direct question about why it happened, he started to attack Goldberg as it was his fault he was added to the chat by Mike Waltz (classy and professional). Imagine if this happened on Biden’s watch. Fox News would’ve been in hysterics, demanding resignations and impeachment. Instead they are spinning it as confident and patriotic interactions between senior officials. Just shows the hypocrisy of all these lovers of “freedom” and “free speech”.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Do you support the US waging a war in Yemen?

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        1. Avatar
          Anonymous

          I do not. Please see my expanded reply above about what I think is the motivation for all this.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            Then let’s talk about that instead of fixating on “motivation” like 12yo girls fantasizing about a favorite K-Pop artist. Motivations are dust, fiction. Only results matter.

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            1. Avatar
              Anonymous

              I don’t understand your logic. Results stem from motivation. They don’t happen in a vacuum.

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                You can’t know anybody’s motivations. It’s all utterly immaterial and boring. “Mommy, I didn’t mean to hurt Bobby” works on the playground. But tell me, how helpful is it when an adult does something shitty to you and then says “I didn’t mean to hurt you” as an excuse? Not helpful at all because intentions and motivations only matter for very little children. Adults know that it’s all about results.

                Like

      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “I don’t think it was planned based on Hegseth’s reply”

        You haven’t watched much pro-wrestling, have you? You need to find and watch a bunch of 1980s WCW (much better at kayfabe than the populist and bland WWF).

        I’m not saying for sure it was planned…. but…. i think there’s at least a 30 % chance that it was.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply
  6. Hugo Avatar
    Hugo

    Clarissa, but motivations are part of the theory of mind that you yourself referenced earlier (when saying that conservatives understand liberals but not vice versa). If you don’t consider people’s motivations, you will never be able to predict anything.

    Please explain how people’s motivations are not part of the theory of mind.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Everybody believes that their motivations are pure and good. Everybody. Also everybody believes that the motivations of their antagonists are evil and dark. That’s also everybody. Once we start bickering about motivations, it all degenerates into “no, you are the racist.” I see absolutely no point in doing that. We have enough difficulties figuring out material reality. Adding into the mix our psychoanalytical musings about the contents of anybody’s psyche will lead is into such depths of nothingness that we’ll be completely lost.

      You can see an example of what I’m saying in this discussion where absolutely nobody is interested in talking about how each administration since the 1990s is doing the exact same thing in what concerns foreign policy, and it doesn’t matter how we vote, we still get yet another war in the Middle East.

      “Yes, but it’s a different war because I magically accessed the contents of Trump’s brain and it’s different.”

      Honestly, I don’t know how people can want to waste time on such discussions when nobody will ever be able to prove their statements.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “believes that their motivations are pure and good”

        Figuring out the motivations of someone you deal with in your real, daily life can often help you figure out how to deal with them better (or help you decide to cut your losses and stop dealing with them entirely).

        Trying to figure out public figures’ motivations with whom you have a parasocial relationship is… mostly pointless.

        In some cases contradictory actions might come from a single place and deduction can help a person figure that out but it has no chance of changing anything and has no real purpose beyond personal curiosity.

        Trump’s foreign policy so far is a walking disaster, antagonizing allies, kneecapping would-be allies and sucking up to adversaries and bombing the middle east and placing Israel in the forefront of unrelated issues all for no good reason that can be explained…. do not good policy make. Who cares what he thinks he’s doing or why he’s doing it…. it’s a rotten turn that no amount of polishing will make better.

        There’s some chance that at some point he might do better but let’s wait for that to happen first.

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        1. Hugo Avatar
          Hugo

          Cliff, I’m not shocked or surprised by any of Trump’s behavior. It’s what I and many others expected and predicted.

          These predictions were made based on our analysis of his personality and motivations. The practical consequences of this were not voting for him to try to avert this.

          This is the opposite of pointless.

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          1. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            Trump’s foreign policy in his first term was far better than Clinton, W and Obama put together….

            No way to predict the disaster now.

            And do you really think Harris would be better?

            How? What do you base that on?

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            1. Hugo Avatar
              Hugo

              You’re implicitly saying that the results of Trump’s first-term foreign policy were good, right?

              I’m not denying that. I am ascribing those results to him not being able to impose his will on everyone because he didn’t know how everything worked yet. People in his administration worked against him and have admitted to that.

              The second time around, he’s hired sycophants and loyalists. Such a collection of people would be less competent because competency is not the main quality selected on. So the policy implemented is closer to what he wants and the administration is collectively more inept.

              I did not say anything about Harris’s policies. I said that Trump’s are what I expected.

              I would have expected Harris’s administration to continue Biden’s policies. Ukrainian drones have been hitting Russian oil depots and infrastructure since the election and would have continued to do so. Biden was obviously hamstringing Ukraine and preventing them from winning.

              I’m hoping that the positive side effect of this will be Europe stepping up.

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                I don’t think people who voted for Harris should use the word “competency” outside of discussions about prostitution.

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            2. Avatar
              Anonymous

              Trump’s foreign policy in his first term was far better than Clinton, W and Obama put together….

              His cozying up to Kim Jong Un was a disaster. He legitimized the Korean dictator but got nothing in return.

              His meeting with Putin was another disaster. You remember Trump said that he believed Putin over his intelligence agencies that Russia didn’t meddle in 2016 elections? Evgeny Prigozhin confirmed that Russia did.

              Trump started negotiations with Taliban over the heads of Afghan government, which lasted a year and ended in another disaster.

              His “perfect” phone call with President Zelensky resulted in his first impeachment.

              He was close to bombing Iran at the end of his first term.

              Is this your idea of a good foreign policy?

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                Said, said, said. Don’t you notice that everything you mention is words? I don’t know how else to explain that I’m not a leftist. I don’t invest words with this outsize importance.

                I very very highly recommend discarding every story about what Trump said. Do it for a month, simply as an experiment. Whenever you see a headline about something that Trump said, skip it and move on. I promise excellent results.

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Moreover, believing that you have access to the psyche of a complete stranger you have only ever seen on a screen is in itself a sign of very low cognitive skills. Oprah doesn’t wear a glittery dress and a fave full of makeup in her kitchen. The dress and the make-up are her persona that she puts on like a costume. The real person we have never met and never will. If that’s news to anybody, that is sad.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        Responding to this:

        “Honestly, I don’t know how people can want to waste time on such discussions when nobody will ever be able to prove their statements.”

        The main point of such discussions is predicting future behavior. This is how theories are proven in science. Trump and his administration are behaving exactly as I expected and I am not surprised by anything. This is the closest we can get to proof.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I’m very glad you found a comforting coping strategy but please understand that some of us evolved beyond needing this sort of a crutch.

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  7. Avatar
    Anonymous

    I can’t respond to your original comment, so this is my response to it (And Bush invaded Iraq not because of money? Why, then?)

    Whataboutism is a lazy response when you have nothing substantial to say. We’re talking about Trump and his motivation for EVERYTHING, not just wars. For what it’s worth, at least the Iraq war had strategic planning and wasn’t a quick response to 9/11, even if misguided. I’m not too naive to believe that politicians act out of morality and not because of political or financial interest (all wars are about financial interest, more or less, including Russia-Ukraine war), but when your ONLY motivation is money, stupid and destructive actions are inevitable, hence Trump’s position on Russia.

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  8. Avatar
    Anonymous

    There is no reply button under this comment so I’m responding to this:

    “Said, said, said. Don’t you notice that everything you mention is words? I don’t know how else to explain that I’m not a leftist. I don’t invest words with this outsize importance.

    I very very highly recommend discarding every story about what Trump said. Do it for a month, simply as an experiment. Whenever you see a headline about something that Trump said, skip it and move on. I promise excellent results.”

    Unlike words of an average person, what a politician says matters. Using your logic, we should not pay attention to anything that Putin says either, correct? Politicians make public statements using words and these words have meaning because they produce certain actions. Paying attention to words has nothing to do with being a leftist. You seem to be so worried not to be identified as a leftist, it’s comical. I’ve noticed over time and among people of different generations in different countries, that the most hateful of the Left are the former leftists. You’ve said in one of your interviews on Kontinent TV that you used to be a liberal, but your obsession with “not being a leftist” blocks any rational thought and openness to calm and thoughtful discussion of the things you may disagree with. You are an intelligent person but sadly you have a huge blind spot when it comes to politics.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      We should absolutely most definitely not pay attention to what Putin says. Because he lies. Please don’t tell me you sit there and actually listen to his 4-hour rants.

      As for words, yes, believing that words supersede and can actually change reality is a neoliberal characteristic. I once again highly recommend concentrating on actions and not words. Most definitely not Putin words.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        “What, are you now claiming that you don’t trust Putin’s words?” a person says after years of reading this blog.

        Yes, what a shocking new development. In a few years, we might actually reach the stunning conclusion that I’m not a Putin fan.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        I do not listen to Putin’s rants, however paying attention to what he says doesn’t equate believing everything he says. I would expect you to understand the difference.

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  9. Avatar
    Anonymous

    WordPress has a strange layout where the comments don’t line up correctly, so I’m responding to this:

    “What, are you now claiming that you don’t trust Putin’s words?” a person says after years of reading this blog.

    Yes, what a shocking new development. In a few years, we might actually reach the stunning conclusion that I’m not a Putin fan.”

    I don’t know how who you’re referring to but I never said this: “are you now claiming that you don’t trust Putin’s words?” You make strange conclusions.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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