That was wild. I was flying home from a trip to France with a few plane changes and each time I got into the Wi-Fi zone there was another big breaking Trump story. And it’s still going on.
The bottom line is Trump has broken with Ukraine and given up all pretence of trying to help in its war with Russia. Trump is both extremely simple to understand but totally impossible to predict.
His agenda is very simple. He wants to bring record high diesel prices down otherwise the Republicans will get trashed in the midterm elections next month. From what I read it is already too late to prevent the Democrats from taking over both houses, but he is going to try anyway.
The upshot is he did a “deal” with Putin to restart diesel exports, but if you dig into the details then the 300,000 tonnes (2.2mn barrels) Russia has agreed to release will last three and half days at current US demand. So, this is less than a gesture. But of course, it is a big win for Putin as it breaks the sanction discipline – and this is a month after Trump signed off on Lindsey Graham’s hellish sanctions that were supposed to break Russia’s economic back.
Bankova was furious and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy went out on a limb to openly criticise the White House calling Trump “weak”. You do not call Trump weak. It is guaranteed to piss him off – and true to form he immediately called for Zelenskiy to be replaced as president for the first time ever.
Trump went on to “demand”, not ask, Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries and Bankova responded by hitting two more the next day. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s former HUR spy master and now the head of the presidential administration who was in Miami in parallel talks on a new peace deal, was similarly outraged after the news broke following a Trump-Putin 1.5 hour phone call which was so friendly neither side wanted to put the receiver down, according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy advisor.
Budanov swore at Kushner and his party, promising to “burn all of Russia’s refineries down” as a result. “Now we’re going to f**king burn every Russian oil refinery and port to the f**king ground. Every last one!”
Errr. I’d call that a breakup.
Then the gloves came off and some really big threats were made. The US has said it will withdraw all its satellite intel that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) needs to not only find targets but also know where Russia’s air defences are. And that was followed overnight by the US withdrawing access to its weapons under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) mechanism where the EU buys US arms on Ukraine’s behalf. That is the main source of what few PAC interceptor missiles that Kyiv is still getting. It was pretty defenceless before and now the AFU will be stripped of what little defence ammo it has left.
The EU rallied around. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that she was releasing another €3bn for Ukrainian defence spending, except without PURL Ukraine can’t buy the very thing it needs most. But that’s all she’s got. The EU once again has been totally sidelined and apart from a few brave words has nothing to offer Ukraine that will make any difference.
Russia has already destroyed two thirds of Ukraine’s power system and is now busily destroying what remains. Kyiv was backed out again last night and the first snows have not even arrived. The city administration has told everyone to stock up on power banks, flashlights, bottled water and canned food. The mayor said that those that can leave the capital should go.
All this talk about an “energy ceasefire” was classic Trump. He put it out there on social media, but within an hour it became clear he just made that up. Zelenskiy told the FT it was “news to me.”
The Kremlin has yet to say anything, but it is perfectly obvious no deal was done.
In all his recent remarks, Putin has said over and over again that no deal is possible until the “root causes” of the war are addressed – a list of demands we are all very familiar with. Zelenskiy, always keen to play the rational actor in this drama, said “of course we will stop blowing up refineries, if the Russians stop blowing up our power stations.”
Ain’t gonna happen.
Why would Putin stop his bombing campaign? He has the upper hand both in the quality and number of missiles and drones, at a time when Ukraine is defenceless against them – and what little hope there was to even get the 300 extra interceptors he has been calling for has just been stripped away by Trump’s temper tantrum.
You can’t run a country like this or deal with a big international crisis by just firing off random tweets that you have just made up because you thought.. what exactly? That you could push diesel prices down with some good news? If that was the plan it didn’t work. Diesel is trading at $6.26 per gallon today, down about 1 cent overnight and 5 cents on a week, but still 71% higher than it was a year ago.
Did he think people would not check if there was a ceasefire in place? I don’t think he thought at all. And that is the point I was making above: he is easy to understand as it's clear what he wants, but he is impossible to predict as he doesn’t think at all.
People are becoming inured to the bonkers things he says: “oh, that is just Trump being crazy again.”
The more serious commentators draw conclusions from a “pick and mix” bag of adjectives and explanations. He is a demagog, demented, narcissistic, or just dingbat. It doesn’t matter. They are all true and none of them are true. I don’t see any policy or strategy at all beyond what he can see at the end of his nose.
This is a serious problem for everyone. It’s not even just random. If it was random, then at least randomness has a structure (The Bell curve) and you can make predictions from that. The cheating in the recent Duma election proved that again as vote fixing destroys the random distribution so you can actually measure exactly how many votes were stolen (about 20% this year).
No, Trump is what we have called a stochastic problem. It’s a maths technical term that goes beyond mere randomness. A stochastic system involves random variables where future values or events are inherently unpredictable. It’s like trying to model eddies in gas flows. The Three Body Problem in physics. It is true chaos and as such it cannot be analysed.
It was Trump’s stochastic tweeting that got him elected in the first place. He would say something mad like he could shoot someone down on Times Square that the media gleefully reported, but then he would say something else equally mad so soon afterwards that the media never had the time to properly roast or debunk his first statement. And he kept doing this. After a while he was simply complaining about everything and threatening to smash the system. As no one is ever happy with the system, these criticisms built up a momentum, and he was elected on a “smash the system” ticket without any plan of what to replace it with other than “winning.”
Ironically, his Republicans are likely to lose big time in the midterms as all he has done is smash the system so it works even less well than before – which is why the record high diesel prices are so important: they are evidence of his complete failure to do anything useful.
Putin has also been branded with a dozen labels - obsessive, autocrat, imperialist, murderer, and so on – but at least with him there is a rational model to explain his irrational behaviour. I had a go in a comment asking: “Has Putin gone mad?” at the start of the war. There I concluded that the one really Soviet thing about him was he was prepared to sacrifice Russia’s prosperity for its security.
And he actually understands this equation (in his own way); remember his 1997 economics PhD dissertation concerned planning and replenishing mineral resources during the transition to a market economy, focusing on St Petersburg and the Leningrad region. It’s just the conclusion he came to – it is worth bringing down sanctions from hell for the sake of keeping Ukraine out of Nato – was a worthwhile trade off; something very few other leaders in this world would agree with or do.
The mad Putin thesis gives you a basis for understanding how he works and allows for (limited) predictive capacity of his actions. But Trump does not.
This is best illustrated by the energy markets. Without any policy at all, the analysts and traders are helpless as there is no model at all. They are left floundering and reacting to individual tweets as the only thing they have to hold on to. Ironically, Trump understands this part, and he and his cronies have been making billions of dollars by shorting stocks before one of these tweets. You can’t do that either, but again it's at the end of Trump’s nose and he wants to be rich so he has.
It is not Zelenskiy that needs to be replaced. It’s Trump. He is running the world towards a new huge energy crisis. Two thirds of the all-time record 400mn barrels of oil from strategic reserves has already been used up and continues to be run down with no sign of either the Ukraine or Iran war coming to an end. And what is Trump going to do about it? We literally have no idea, as Trump has no ideas.
This article originally appeared in Editor’s Picks, a free daily email digest of bne IntelliNews’ best stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up for free here.
https://to989.infusionsoft.com/app/form/editors-picks-subscribers