Morons And Motivations

Why incentives will strongly influence Trump’s attempts to hand Ukraine to Russia as quickly as possible

The master and his orange puppet

Ever since Biden’s extremely slender victory over Trump in 2020 (thanks to the ludicrous Electoral College system Biden may have won around seven million more votes but his actual margin of victory was less than 43,000 votes) I’ve been predicting that the orange moron would (i) return to the White House in 2025 and then immediately (ii) do everything he can to hand Ukraine to Putin on a vulgar Trump-branded platter.

Sure enough, Trump did waddle back into the White House on 20th January 2025, and sure enough he is now doing everything he and his slithering coterie of ultra-far-right Republican enablers can think of to ensure Putin’s conquest of Ukraine succeeds. While babbling journalists and vacuous commentators chart the moment-by-moment inanities that spew forth from the mouths of Trump and his various assorted reptilian halfwits, the outcome is not really in doubt.

The US Republicans will do everything possible, including offering Putin vast sums of cash, to ensure Russian victory over Ukraine so they can turn the entire nation into one vast gulag. But it’s not going to be quite as easy as the orange moron imagines. This is because the incentives operating on Trump and on Putin are radically different.

Once we understand this, we understand how things are likely to unfold.

Let’s begin with Putin. He sits atop a pyramid scheme based on kleptomania and thuggery. The way Russian criminal gangs are organized — and therefore the way all of Russian society is organized — is by pyramids. At the top of each pyramid sits a крыша (“roof”). When members of different gangs clash, the problem is referred upward and the two “roofs” sit down to negotiate a settlement if possible. If not possible, bloodshed follows. These pyramids include not merely gangsters but also practically every organization in Russia except tiny family-run businesses (but even these have to pay protection money to the local police, who send some of the takings up to the local mayor and his cronies, who send some percentage up to the regional governor and his friends). Thus the military comprises a series of pyramids, all oligarch businesses are…