Benoît Auger 🇺🇦 🇵🇸

How to destroy Trump verbally - quick 17 min workshop

Piecemeal remarks on where Ukraine, Russia, USA and Europe are at: - Ukraine is feeling out Russian weaknesses in its war on Russian soil. The better it does, the more leverage it will have against Putin's winter assault on Ukraine - for which Putin is already gleefully preparing. - The Kremlin is still in the same place Sam Greene captured in 2023 when he wrote that the Russians want negotiations without negotiating. - Putin is hoping for someone who isn't Zelensky to come to power. He knows he can't have someone like Medvedchuk, but he hopes for a leader more amenable to Kremlin interests. He knows this can't happen without a political crisis or a collapse of state capacity in Ukraine. But he keeps hoping. - In principle, the Kremlin is more receptive to doing favours and making concessions on Iran, if the US can offer it something in return, but it's not my expertise to analyse the extent of this. - Putin is slowly running out of financial capacity to bribe people to enter his war. As substantive support for Putin in Russia is also low - which is different to the depoliticised outsourcing of politics to Putin which most Russians engage in - the regime will have to engage in more totalitarian turns as it centres the country on war. - Trump is increasingly dysregulated and tilted over Iran and his lame duck predicament. - Trump wants as much distraction from Iran as he can get in the informational environment. - Trump wants as much cacophony and nuttiness in the informational environment as possible, in the run-up to the midterms. - Trump wants to preemptively delegitimate midterm results that may be bad for him - Europe is anxious about a building wave of alt-right post-truth populism - Europe remains confused about how to balance social spending and security spending. There is a certain degree of room for having one's cake and eating it too, but that requires bold leadership. - Europe is still unserious about Trump being a symptom of a wider disease, and not the disease itself. - The current approach remains to sabotage Trump's attempts to sabotage Ukraine and European support for it - as subtly as possible.