Trump’s Stupidity, As Always

19 August 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On August 19th, the brilliant retired CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson headlined “Trump Still Fails to Understand Russia’s Fundamental Reason for the Special Military Operation, But He is Trying”, and he opened by summarizing Trump’s stupidity about the war in Ukraine:

Despite claims from the Trump administration about the success of Monday’s meeting with Zelensky and the European pimp delegation, the prospect for a successful negotiation to end the war in Ukraine is zero. Trump continues to mistakenly believe that he simply needs to get Putin and Zelensky together, who will hammer out a deal. Trump labors under the false assumption that the war in Ukraine was caused in part by a personal tiff between Putin and Zelensky. Putin has been very clear that he will only meet with Zelensky once the details of a Ukrainian surrender have been agreed on. Trump also thinks that is nothing more than a dispute over land, and that land swaps is a key to achieving a peace agreement. Here again Trump displays profound ignorance about the legal status of Zaporhyzhia and Kherson republics under the Russian Constitution. Putin cannot concede any of that territory to Ukraine anymore than Trump could give Alaska back to Russia.

On 4 February 2025, I had headlined “Trump’s Stupidity”, and opened:

On February 3rd, Reuters reported that Keith Kellogg — the man whom on the basis of an April 2024 article he wrote advising the U.S. Government on the basis of an entirely unrealistically optimistic assumption about what Russia would consider in order to reach agreement with the U.S. Government to settle the war in Ukraine, became selected by Trump to become his negotiator to end that war — told Reuters that “The Biden administration had a fear of escalation. My belief is that great powers do not fear escalation.”

He is correct that “The Biden administration had a fear of escalation” in the Ukraine war. They were extremely reluctant to escalate it up to the point where Russia’s essential national-security “red line” would become crossed so that in order for Russia to prevent the U.S. from some day placing a U.S. nuclear missile on the closest of all borders to the Kremlin, at around Sumy in Ukraine, approximately 300 miles or 510 kilometers (a mere five minutes of missile-flying time away from blitz-first-strike decapitating Russia’s central command), Russia would be left with only two options — either capitulate to the U.S. Government, or else launch WW3 itself in order to avoid capitulating to it.

On 21 September 2024, I had headlined “Scott Ritter: How Close We Came to WW3 on September 13th” and gave a time-line of the key events, on September 13th, and September 15th, in the build-up toward President Biden’s ultimate decision to postpone until after the November 5th U.S. Presidential elections his decision to cross Russia’s red line before 20 January 2024 — before the end of Biden’s term of office. Biden ultimately decided not to do it. Kellogg rejects that “fear of escalation.” He rejects it because “great powers do not fear escalation.”

Keith Kellogg is saying that America — which no one denies is at least “a great power” — did a very wrong thing on this, because “The Biden administration had a fear of escalation. My belief is that great powers do not fear escalation.” That way points straight to WW3. Russia is not going to capitulate to ANY nation. (FDR had carefully and brilliantly planned to end all “balance-of-powers” — i.e., contesting imperialisms — but Truman promptly trashed those plans and instituted the goal of achieving an all-encompassing U.S. global dictatorship, much like what Hitler had planned for Germany to achieve, and ideologically this Truman plan is now called “neoconservatism.” Kellogg is in that vein — a carrier of Truman's international vision. He is saying that America must conquer all nations that it hasn’t already won for its empire.)

How intelligent would Donald Trump need to be to regret that he had hired Kellogg for that crucial function of negotiating with Russia an end to the war in Ukraine? How intelligent would he need to have been in order to have even considered Kellogg to be insufficiently intelligent to serve in this crucial position — and therefore never hired him in the first place? Even ordinary people can easily recognize that Trump’s having appointed Kellogg to that function was monumentally stupid and dangerous for the entire world.

Sheer stupidity in a U.S. President produces a situation in which the very continuation of all of human civilization, and maybe even of life on Earth, is a “crapshoot.”

America had already failed monstrously, to have reached a point such as this. What is Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) now supposed to be meaning — if anything?

A reader of this article at another site observed that it raises a “danger flag” about the U.S., and asked what ought to be the world’s response to a country such as the post-1945 America. I replied, and say here:

It is a "danger flag" and even a flag of extreme danger — the extreme dangerousness of the post-FDR U.S. Government (and of all of its colonies or 'allies').

No country that isn't YET an 'ally' of the U.S. Government should have and display anything but contempt for it. …

Trump STILL hasn’t fired Keith Kellogg. Trump is an extremely dangerous stupid man who thinks that he is God’s gift to Mankind.

The collective West, with the leaders it has, is now being tested to determine whether its response to its obvious decline will be to go with Kellogg’s “Great powers do not fear escalation” (which will lead straight to WW3), or, instead, will go with sanity (which will lead to the U.S. Government’s recognizing and accepting that its dream of grabbing control over the entire world is not merely evil, but plain stupid — and must stop immediately).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.