The most frightening possible prospect in presidential politics is placing the U.S. nuclear codes in the hands of an angry, impulsive lunatic; the very existence of the planet is at stake. It is exponentially more frightening if that lunatic is under the sway of the world’s most powerful sworn enemy of the United States.
Is Putin an intractable foe of the United States? Is Trump Putin’s puppet? Is Trump deranged? Yes to all three. Let me explain, in the hope that each of you, dear readers, will explain this to your less-than-fanatic friends that harbor any notion of voting for Trump. This issue outweighs all others.
Putin as Geopolitical Foe. Dr. Leon Aron, the Director of Russian Studies at the very conservative American Enterprise Institute (no friend of Democrats, Clintons, or Obama), published a paper just seven weeks ago stating that Putin named the demise of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century” (Putin’s words). (Think about that – we consider the fall of the Iron Curtin and the dismantling of the Soviet Union as the most positive event in geopolitics since victory in World War II, with all presidents from Truman through Bush the Elder sharing credit for it – and Putin explicitly wants to reverse it.) Dr. Aron states that in Putin’s world view, “the end of the Cold War was Russia’s equivalent of the Versailles Treaty for German – a source of endless humiliation and misery.” Putin’s “overarching strategic agenda . . . is to recover and repossess the political, economic and geostrategic assets lost by the Soviet state at its fall.” Dr. Aron states that the most profound principle of the Putin regime is the belief that Russia “is menaced by an external force” with “the greatest threats coming from NATO and the United States,” and that Putin called Europe-leaning Ukraine “NATO’s foreign legion.” Dr. Aron’s article is at docs.house.gov/...;
Look what happened. In 2014, when Ukraine got too democratic and Euro-leaning to suit him, Putin invaded Crimea and then annexed it, turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake. One of his excuses was that Ukraine deposed its mass murderer, president Viktor Yanukovych, who fired on protesters at a pro-democracy rally in Kyev. Putin then sent, into Eastern Ukraine, tanks and Russian rebels (who, against all evidence, he said were indigenous Ukrainians). Those rebels remain in control of Donetsk and Luhansk in Southeast Ukraine, to this day. These same thugs shot down a Dutch airliner. Now, while continuing to menace Ukraine’s sovereignty, Putin threatens to invade the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Make no mistake, despite some Russian-sympathizers in Southeast Ukraine, all four of these former Soviet states love democracy, love independence, and look west; taken together, they are among the most strategic places in the world.
The Baltic States are members of NATO; Ukraine has applied but isn’t yet. Putin considers this an enormous threat, as (except for Russia itself), Ukraine was the most important of the Soviet states. After all, Ukraine is a country of 49 million people; is in area the largest country wholly within Europe; and is naturally the most fertile agricultural area in Europe.
Putin has the only nuclear arsenal that can threaten ours, by far the second largest in the world. And he hates NATO, where “an attack on one is an attack on all.”
NATO, the pillar of American and European policy since 1949, must be strengthened, not weakened, as there is no other credible deterrent to Putin’s western expansion. After 15 years in power, Putin has finally found an American politician ignorant enough to support weakening NATO. His name is Donald J. Trump.
Trump Is Putin’s Puppet. Michael Morell, a political independent who served presidents of both parties and who ran the CIA, put it best: “Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. . . . Putin played on Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.” Mr. Morell’s op-ed is here — www.nytimes.com/...
Suddenly, Trump was making statements denigrating NATO; Putin loved it and complimented him some more. Trump publicly urged Putin to commit cyber-attacks on an ex-Secretary of State, the moral equivalent of treason and of espionage. Imagine this dynamic at work in a Trump presidency.
What complicates the dynamic and makes it all the more insidious is that the head of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, is Yanukovych’s man (and therefore Putin’s man) in the United States. Manafort was, may still be, and likely plans to be again, the top paid lobbyist for Yanukovych, lobbying to defeat or weaken sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine. It is inconceivable that Manafort would have no continuing influence over a President Trump.
A moment’s comparison is in order. Putin’s main excuse for support of the Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine was that there are many ethnic Russians there. Did any American politician have the brains, gall, and experience to state that Putin’s pretext for invading Ukraine is exactly parallel to Hitler’s (“give ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland their freedom or we will take it”) for invading the Czechoslovakia in 1938? Yes, exactly one, and her name is Hillary R. Clinton.
Thus, it is all too likely that Putin would pull the puppet strings, hoping that Trump would dance. How vulnerable would Trump (and therefore America) be to such influence? At 70, Trump’s psychological profile is not apt to change, and to that profile we now turn.
Trump Is Deranged In the Worst Way – Impulsive, Narcissistic, Given to Anger. Dan P. McAdams, a professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern, has studied and written extensively about Donald Trump’s personality traits. See this www.theatlantic.com/... and this www.theguardian.com/... Dr. McAdams sums up the traits that define Donald Trump -- “angry impulsivity, narcissistic goals, and a life credo of the warrior, affirming the power of the counterpunch.” No sentient human who has followed this campaign would disagree. With the nuclear codes in his hand, and his ability to trigger a nuclear attack in 12 minutes, possibly leading to a chain reaction, this is combination that threatens the very existence of civilization if not humanity.
Let’s not rely on just one source. Please compare this definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” to what we know of Donald Trump. See mentalhealth.com… and www.mayoclinic.org/...
As Dr. McAdams says, “Donald Trump is trapped by an angry, impulsive temperament that precludes his stepping away from the moment to survey what the situation demands of him.” Recall and compare JFK, the coolest head in the room, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and imagine Trump in the same position.
Now let’s apply these. Imagine Trump receiving a profound insult or threat from a foreign head of state, late at night when he is locked in a room twittering away. Imagine further that Putin, wishing to embarrass the U.S., stoking this anger, telling Trump that some third nation is going imminently to attack. The President and only the President of the U.S. can launch a nuclear attack, and can do so in minutes. Putin takes no blame, as if it would matter.
And of course it doesn’t help that Trump is ill-versed in national security, thinking that the nuclear triad is his package, and asking three times in a one-hour briefing why we built nuclear weapons if we aren’t going to use them. We build them so we will never have to use them.
Now if your friends or family members think they disagree, ask them if this is a risk they are willing to take on behalf of their children and grandchildren and all humanity for all the future.
