Donald Trump loves to talk about “deals” – as if wars were merely tedious negotiations over square footage, suffering a collateral side effect of diplomacy. Now it’s Russia. And again: no word about the dead, no rebuke for the aggressor. Just a cold calculation in the Oval Office: “If I think I’m close to getting a deal, I don’t want to screw it up by doing that.”
What he means is sanctions. What he means is: don’t disturb Russia while it continues to kill, torture, and deport – in Bucha, in Mariupol, in Kharkiv. And while Vladimir Putin proves every day anew that his war is not being negotiated, but waged – with rockets, with propaganda, with cold calculation.
And Trump? He sees himself as the conductor of a peace whose melody only he can hear. A president who, in his second term, no longer distinguishes between friend and foe, but between the useful and the inconvenient. Putin – as so often – falls into the first category.
The Mercy of the Powerful, the Silence of the Weak
It is a pattern that grows clearer: those who use violence, who threaten or hate, are not held accountable – they are courted. Recall: just days earlier, Trump stated that he was seriously considering pardoning Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr., the men lawfully convicted of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Terrorists – in the truest sense of the word.
And now Russia. A state that tramples the UN Charter, that deliberately destroys civilian infrastructure, that uses hunger as a weapon and systematically abducts children from Ukraine. A state whose actions should be tried before the International Criminal Court – not negotiated in the West Wing of the White House.
But for Donald Trump, this seems irrelevant. He doesn’t want to “interfere.” As if diplomacy were a fragile dough that collapses under too much pressure. But what’s being practiced here is not diplomacy – it is indulgence. It is a free pass for evil, as long as it serves strategic interests.
A Morality of Expediency
In Trump’s worldview, the guiding principle is not law, but utility. Human rights are a nuisance, international law an annoying formality, truth negotiable. Those who are useful are protected. Those who interfere are sacrificed.
That Putin is allowed to go on killing with impunity in this world is no accident. It is doctrine. Just as it is doctrine that Trump’s own power must remain untouchable. That’s why the FBI is discredited, why judges and prosecutors are threatened, why criminals are turned into martyrs if they act in Trump’s name.
And that is why Russia is spared – not out of hope, but out of calculation. Because no one expects peace from Putin, only leverage, power, geopolitical chess moves. On the backs of those dying today in bombed-out hospitals.
The Extinction of Reality
But how long can such a worldview hold? How long can a president pretend that compassion is weakness and accountability a burden? How long can a country afford it?
The truth is – not much longer. Because Trump’s vision of a world order – shaped by deals with despots and acts of mercy for violent offenders – is not only morally bankrupt, it is dangerous. It destroys the idea of democracy from within. It turns perpetrators into heroes and victims into footnotes.
Anyone like Trump who withholds sanctions from Russia while bombs rain down on Ukrainian cities is not performing a diplomatic balancing act – they are carrying out a moral capitulation.
And anyone who believes peace can be achieved through silence in the face of a murderer is not living in reality.
They are living in a hall of mirrors, where the truth bends – until it pleases them.
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