Ending the World to Own Trump

Ukraine's 18-month plan to execute "Russia's Pearl Harbor" leaves humanity at the edge of extinction, and Western analysts are giddy

In a segment titled, “Ukraine burns Putin, but also schools Trump with surprise drone attack,” MSNBC hosts Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow chatted giddily after a paradigm-shifting operation by Volodymyr Zelensky that left the world on the edge of nuclear exchange. Rachel first plugged Wallace’s new podcast, The Best People, then they bantered about Wallace’s husband, then moved on to Ukraine’s “audacious” Sunday drone attacks, said to have destroyed a third of Russia’s “strategic carriers” in an operation widely dubbed “Russia’s Pearl Harbor.”

“I feel like you’re, you’re one of my friends who understands how my brain works on this sort of thing,” Rachel asked, beaming. “Like, it is an incredible war story about Ukraine’s capability and their resilience and their creativity and the way they have just done this, you know, like David versus Goliath… But it also does have international strategic implications for every country in the world… In Russia’s position, in terms of thinking about its own defenses, thinking about its own nuclear deterrence…”

A network scriptwriter once told me the purpose of every TV news segment was to end on the note, “Isn’t that weird?” That’s how Rachel framed this moment: “Ukraine just pulled off this incredible David and Goliath story, but it also has strategic implications in terms of nuclear deterrence — isn’t that weird?”

It was, agreed Wallace, who managed a few moments of smileless narration as she offered a grave observation. “The idea that Ukraine will not score massive victories in this war, and do massive damage to Russia that will also have implications to our national security, was probably an erroneous assumption,” she said. But yes, in general, the situation is “bat bleep crazy,” because:

Trump is moving the country away from what the people want it to be. And when you look at what Ukraine did it, it didn’t just score a massive military victory. It displayed technological competence that is the envy of the world this morning. So it’s, it’s not just that we’re on the wrong side. It’s not just that we’re flying blind, it’s that we may have missed out on an unbelievable technological breakthrough that we, heaven forbid might need someday…

For almost ten years we’ve had a consensus mechanism that evaluates all things this way: if it’s bad for Trump, it’s good for the world. It started with being “disappointed” to learn Robert Mueller didn’t find Russian agents in the White House and progressed to “told you so” tales of 400,000 deaths proving Trump wrong about Covid. Now we have the best political Schadenfreude story ever: Nuclear showdown proves Trump’s incompetence. Or, as Walter Kirn put it, ending the world to own Trump.

The Maddow segment was one of a pile of ebullient “Peace Averted!” responses to Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb,” which in any normal era would be covered first as an unprecedented escalation of nuclear tension. Officially now, politicians and media have gone mad, so focused on Trump that they no longer see or acknowledge danger to you, me, and the rest of the world beyond. The headlines alone are mind-boggling: