"Putin will eat you for lunch, Donald!", warned Kamala Harris. He just did.

"In 24 hours" and "Putin respects me" turned out to be typical Trump BS. And as a result, more Ukrainians are dying. Two reasons: Putin is a murderous tyrant, and Donald Trump is dumb and uneducated.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

Kamala Harris was right.

“Putin will eat you for lunch, Donald!” Harris warned during their presidential debate on September 11, 2024. And exactly six months later, Putin did.

Now I am getting worried just how right Harris will turn out to be, because six months ago, she concluded: “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now….”

‘The ball is in Russia’s court’ - yeah, not so much or for very long.

On March 11, the Trump administration forced the Ukrainians to agree to a 30-day ceasefire - with no conditions. (That in itself is quite a striking admission for a country that has seen 20% of its land occupied by Russia, hundreds of thousands murdered and maimed and 10+ millions turned into refugees.)

“Now the ball is in Russia’s court”, Ukrainian and European leaders and, of course Donald Trump, all agreed. The latter with a big, self-confident smirk. But I probably didn’t need to tell you that.

And then within 48 hours – exactly as Kamala Harris had predicted six months ago – the Russian KGB-spy-turned-dictator in the Kremlin ate the self-obsessed, old-man-spoiled-brat in the Oval Office for lunch.

Putin said yes to the ceasefire proposal - but ‘yes’ in the KGB manner.

That meant Putin pronouncing the word ‘yes’, but then attaching a string of conditions to the ‘yes’ - conditions that he knew full well were totally unacceptable to the Ukrainians, thus in reality saying ‘yes’ but meaning no. Not a chance. Get lost.

“We agree with the proposal to cease hostilities, but we have to bear in mind that this ceasefire must be aimed at a long-lasting peace, and it must look at the root causes of the crisis,” said Putin on Friday.

Putin raised a number of points, and so-called ‘independent commentators’ raised further questions. But seeing as Mr Putin runs a hardline dictatorship , it is probably not unreasonable to assume that those concerns are also his. So, the Russian position is that:

• Ukraine can never become a member of NATO.

• Ukraine should halt its mobilization and any training of its soldiers.

• The West should stop supplying weapons to Kyiv during the ceasefire.

• Any agreement should be a permanent agreement not a temporary ceasefire

  (which Moscow claims would just give a break to the Ukrainian army).

• There must not be any foreign military presence in Ukraine after a peace agreement: “under any flag, whether it be a foreign contingent, military bases, or some peacekeeping operations,” said the Russian foreign ministry.

• Ukraine must be permanently nuclear-free.

• Ukraine must recognize that Crimea and four of its provinces (20% of the country) belong to Russia.

Thereby Putin turned the tables on Trump. And sadly, also on the Ukrainians. And as a result, many more Ukrainians will die. In fact, they already have and are.

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky said that Russia had launched 1,000 drones and 1,300 guided bombs against Ukraine over the past week: “This is not what someone who wants a quick end to the war does.”

A thick president vs a tough Russian

Why and how did this happen? Elementary, my dear Watson, for two reasons:

One, because the Russian President is a vile, sneaky, cynical, brutal-beyond-belief bastard. And two, because the U.S. President is a self-obsessed fool, with zero knowledge or understanding of international relations, and he is surrounded by cowards and yes-Sir-Donald-boys-not-men. (The best of many examples of this is little Marco Rubio, officially the U.S. Secretary of State, and a man who does know better than to trust Putin, but was now desperately trying to blend in with the fabric of the sofa in the Oval Office during the Trump/Vance attack on Zelensky. This bizarre scene has already been immortalized by Saturday Night Live - that will forever have quashed Rubio’s presidential ambitions.)

Anybody who has studied Russia and Putin for about five minutes in an average high-school or, indeed, followed the news since 2014 when Russia first invaded Ukraine, could have predicted what Putin’s answer would be to the 30-day ceasefire proposal. But, of course, Donald Trump only studies his own belly bottom.

In fact, we know from eyewitnesses that the current U.S. President is extremely averse to studying anything, i.e. knowing and understanding - anything. In 2022, Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glaser of The New Yorker published their wonderful book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 - based on unprecedented access to Trump, his cabinet, advisors, the Oval Office, everything. They demonstrate in painful detail that President Trump is averse to being briefed, receiving information, listening to anybody else. And that his knowledge of international relations is literally zero. In November 2024, they were interviewed by the investigative journalist and political scientist Yevgenia Albats.

Peter Baker:

“In our book, we write about the scene where Trump's being briefed about how NATO works and the Alliance’s article 5 (on collective defense), and he says, ‘wait a second, wait a second. You mean if Lithuania gets attacked, I have to go defend them?’ He says, ‘That's crazy.’”

Without exaggerating, I think that this must be the most astonishing example of ignorance by any western leader I have ever heard about. Ever. Please read the above conversation again: the man the Americans have put in charge of world security - twice! - did not know how NATO works. NATO - the absolute cornerstone of western security. The. President. Did. Not. Know.

An ‘unbriefable’ president

But not only did the Donald not know what NATO was, but he also staunchly refuses to learn. This week I talked to a long-standing member of the national security team that regularly briefs U.S. presidents. This military expert has briefed Obama, Trump and Biden. For obvious reasons, he wants to remain anonymous, but he told me that during Trump’s first term, the security briefings - which with Obama would take one hour, sometimes longer - “often sort of stopped after 5 or max 10 minutes when the President would get up and simply leave, or start talking about something completely irrelevant, like golf or a tweet he had written or a tv programme he had seen the night before. His officials would then politely nod us briefers to leave the room. He almost never asked questions and it was clear that these briefings were just a charade. President Trump once said to me, ‘You can stop now, son, I was in Paris with my father twice even before you were born, we stayed at a tremendous hotel, golden furniture everywhere, big paintings, I know France.’”

“The President constantly confused foreign names and places: when I once mentioned the former French president Mitterrand and the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a discussion of European security, he tartly retorted “Well, that was a very different time, buddy, we are not in the Second World War any longer, are we buddy, do you also want to call Churchill on the blower?” In fact, Mitterrand was the president of France 1981-1995 and Kohl was German chancellor 1982-1998, two of the giants behind German reunification and the modern European security architecture.

CIA agents have revealed that “Trump’s fact-free approach” constituted a nightmare for briefers. At some point, the briefings were cut from every day - as with Obama and Biden - to only twice a week. There was simply no point to them.

(The Intelligencer 2018)

Baker and Glaser are among the few people who have intensive knowledge of both Trump and Putin. Peter Baker tells the following illustrative story about Trump, whom he calls “a consistent admirer of Putin”, bragging to Putin - at the summit in 2018 - about how much the Israelis love him:

“‘They love me so much, they've named a settlement after me. You know, Trump Heights.’ And Putin answers laconically, ‘Well maybe Donald, they should just name all of Israel after you.’”

“I'm not sure that Trump got that Putin was mocking him for his narcissism and his egoism, but Putin definitely has his number,” says Baker.

“Putin is an agent who's manipulating a very manipulable character,” adds Susan Glaser, “You know, really, he [Trump] is as empty of a vessel when it comes to history or context on Russia or the Soviet Union as you could possibly imagine.”

“He thought the Balkans were the Baltics,”, laughs Peter Baker.

Trump’s former security advisor, John Bolton, wrote in his memoirs about how “Trump thinks that Putin is his friend”, but that “Putin often played Trump.”

“Putin respects me” = the international version of ‘bleach cures Covid’

Nobody can forget Trump’s vicious, personal, bizarre and almost poetically-stupid attacks on Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the U.S. government during Covid – culminating in Trump’s suggestion that injecting bleach might cure Covid.

Trump’s bizarre outbursts about Ukraine and Putin is the Donald’s equivalent of drinking bleach applied to international relations and the war in Ukraine:

“I will have the war in Ukraine sorted in 24 hours”, “that is a war that is dying to be settled, I will have it settled even before I become president”, “I know Putin very well, he respects me, Putin respects me.” Those statements have proved to be as dumb and baseless as the on about that drinking bleach would cure Covid. And therefore, predictably, with zero result.

It’s really is beneath me to say nasty things about Trump, but you tell me, please: when a president again and again says dumb and wrong things that are verifiably wrong and dumb - what would you call this president?

According to the Ukrainian president – a man who has met and signed several ceasefire agreements with Putin himself – agreements which Putin broke before the ink had dried – the Russian dictator has broken no less than 25 agreements with Ukraine.

But when Zelensky had the audacity to put it to the U.S. President and his Vice President that Putin was an extremely unreliable partner, and that neither of them had a clue about the Russian leader and his line of thinking, the Americans - televised to the world - went into a vicious rage against the Ukrainian president, culminating in two things: First Zelensky and his team were unceremoniously kicked out of the White House, and secondly the U.S. government immediately paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine and stopped weapons and ammunitions deliveries.

As a direct result, hundreds of Ukrainians died in the following days before Zelensky gave in and agreed to the U.S. proposals of a 30-day ceasefire. Don’t take my word for it, this is the reporting of TIME magazine, March 8, 2025.

Are the American people aware of the costs of the primitive, personal revenge games their president plays?

In a piece on this blog last week, Eileen O’Connor wrote that Trump’s biographer Tony Schwartz stressed that when Trump feels threatened or opposed, he “moves into a fight-or-flight state,” and that he “reacts rather than reflects, and damn the consequences.”

Fight or flight

As a direct result of the miscalculations of the U.S. President, many more Ukrainians will die. We are in a situation where one of two things will happen:

One, the U.S. President can bow to Putin and throw Ukraine under the bus - and try to pressure Ukraine to give in to Putin’s demands. Seeing as both Trump and his vice-president on many occasions have intimated that they see an agreement along the same lines as Putin, this seems by far the most likely outcome: Ukraine will lose 20% of its territory, will never become members of NATO, no foreign troops or real security guarantees will be given, Zelensky will have to resign, no Russians would be punished for the invasion, no justice for Ukraine etc. You know the Putin drill.

Pressuring the Ukrainians to accept such a ‘deal’ will then either lead to a split between Ukraine and the Trump administration or - in the case that Ukraine does sign such an agreement - to internal turmoil and instability within Ukraine. (For reasons to do with human decency, I don’t even want to put words or details to this scenario, but it would not be pretty.)

Or – the other version – the Donald can go crazy and ’super-arm’ Ukraine; as he has said on occasions - if Putin doesn’t show willingness to seek peace, “we're going to give them (the Ukrainians) more than they ever got, if we have to…”

This would be unlikely to lead to a Russian defeat, at least not a quick one: Putin knows that he is either president or in prison or worse and will not be able to politically survive a defeat. Plus Trump would be advised by his own intelligence service and military not to go to far in rearming Ukraine – for fear of creating instability in Russia, a nuclear power, splintering into a hundred pieces with nukes floating around.

So, to the surprise of no adults, it turns out that …

• belly button watching and admiring yourself in the mirror is not the best preparation for dirty infighting with an ex-KGB spy/Russian dictator.

• the Donald could not solve the conflict “in 24 hours.”

• the Donald did not “know Putin” and

• “Putin respects me” was just more BS from a cheap snake oil salesman.

• Kamala Harris was right: “Donald, Putin will eat you for lunch.”

Who would have guessed? Well, anybody with just a smidgeon of information, education and intelligence. Ah.

Frightingly, it now remains to be seen whether Kamala Harris will also be proved right in what she warned next: “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now, with his eyes on the rest of Europe ….”