Should this be seen as the Hans Christian Andersen story, in which the narcissistic emperor is finally exposed as a naked fool by a truth-telling child?
Donald Trump is certainly all of these things: narcissistic, naked in his support for Putin and a fool. But the parallel doesn’t quite work because it hasn’t taken a child to reveal this. He has done it himself, in plain sight, through his waiving of America’s own sanctions on Russia, his “deal” to buy Russian diesel and his betrayal of Ukraine by deliberately making it more vulnerable to Russian drones and missiles.
The betrayal is both of Ukraine and of America’s European “allies,” for Trump has made it undeniable that he is now working to support the country, Russia, that is engaged in daily “hybrid” warfare against every European NATO member. Under this gangster-president, for the first time since NATO’s creation the members not only disagree about policy, as has often been the case, but are now on different sides in a major conflict.
My Substack yesterday looked at how the allies will want to re-establish collaboration with America after Trump leaves office. His conduct now shows both how impossible collaboration now is but also how personal America’s betrayal really is: This is a betrayal by a president who does not care what American public or even political opinion thinks.
So a better literary parallel might be Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Goldfinger, in which the evil Auric Goldfinger attempts to stage his theft from Fort Knox with the help of a group of American mafia bosses, one of whom is the gloriously named Pussy Galore. Quite apart from the fact that her name aptly fits Trump’s own “Access Hollywood tape” description of the masculine benefits of stardom, Fleming’s storyline of gangsters helping gangsters more nearly matches the way in which Trump and Putin are conspiring together to kill Ukrainians and steal Ukrainian territory. But it would be pure fantasy to believe that Natalie Harp will prove a real-life Pussy Galore, prepared to foil her boss’s dastardly schemes. Alas.
The Goldfinger parallel otherwise fits quite well: In Fleming’s book, after all, Auric Goldfinger is revealed to be a cheat at golf and cards and to lust after gold in all its forms; in the end he is exposed as incompetent. Where it doesn’t work is that in the Putin-Trump alliance the clever one is Putin, not Trump: Trump more resembles the vulgar, greedy New Jersey mafia bosses in Fleming’s fictional creation than the sophisticated super-villain. Nonetheless we can hope that the eventual comeuppance will match that of the ultimately doomed and unsuccessful Goldfinger, even if we don’t have either a James Bond or a Pussy Galore to rely upon to bring it about.
It is not enough, however, to find gruesome parallels for this real-life disaster. The consequences of the active alliance with Russia’s war criminals that Donald Trump and his more Goldfingeresque partner, Elon Musk, have now made explicit is being seen in a tragic rise in the daily death rate of civilians in Ukrainian cities. The excellent Phillips O’Brien explained in his Substack newsletter yesterday how it is the deliberate slowdown of Musk’s Starling/Starshield services for the Ukrainian military that is having the biggest effect.
As O’Brien says, both Musk and Trump are strangely reluctant to take responsibility for what they are doing as this deadly alliance with Russia is politically unpopular in the United States. The real mystery is why they have decided to dial up their support for Putin now, just three weeks before the mid-terms.
O’Brien’s theory, that the reason must be that Putin’s situation is getting desperate and he needs the support, is an appealing one though not entirely convincing. It is true that Russian forces are losing territory in the land war, and taking an even more terrible toll of casualties than before. But the damage Russia has been able to do to Ukraine’s energy and other infrastructure through its missile and drone attacks has also been substantial, with Ukraine’s air defenses already depleted thanks to the shortage of Patriot missile interceptors.
Moreover, the plot looks about to thicken. A report in the Wall Street Journal on October 18th seems to confirm an idea that had already been rumored: that Putin, Trump and Xi Jinping may hold a trilateral summit soon, most likely on November 18th and 19th on the occasion of the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum) meeting due to be held in Shenzhen. (If my gift link to the WSJ doesn’t work, Heather Cox Richardson has also written about it in her Substack today.)
This alas makes perfect gangster-Goldfinger sense: Russia and China are the countries with most influence over Iran, while Trump’s United States has ways to put Ukraine under pressure, as it has just shown. So a deal on mutual support is available to be discussed, even without mentioning Taiwan. It is largely for fear of a betrayal over Taiwan or North Korea that rumors of such a meeting have been circulating recently in Japan.
This promises to be a very nasty few months, probably especially so as the new Congress will not take office until early January, perhaps tempting Trump to try to push forward some of his personal projects during the lame duck period. What we have to hope for is three things:
- That the Republicans’ defeat on November 3rd is sufficiently devastating that it leads more members of that party to break ranks from Trump and to grow spines, even before the new Congress takes office;
- That European governments find ways to forget their own political woes and rush more financial and military support to Ukraine, along the lines proposed in recent days by Volodymr Zelenskyy;
- And that Ukraine finds more ways in the next few days and weeks to humiliate Putin, Trump and Musk by showing that its will and its resourcefulness remains strong enough to overcome this betrayal.
Perhaps it is in Ukraine that a James Bond and a Felix Leiters (Bond’s CIA friend) will be found, to destroy Goldfinger and his conspiracy. Slava Ukraini.
This article was originally published on Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished with permission.
Bill Emmott, a former editor-in-chief of The Economist, is the author of The Fate of the West.
