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Monday
If you want to understand how apparatchiks in George Orwell’s 1984 operate, look no further than South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. How is it that one can be singing the praises of Eurasia one week and attacking them as evil incarnate the next? Well, check out Graham’s response to Zelensky after Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ambushed him this past weekend.
First, however, the passage in 1984:
[T]o trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
Now to Graham, who in 2022 was calling Zelensky “the Winston Churchill of our time.” As recently as two weeks ago, he said that Zelensky “is the ally I’ve waited for my whole life.” Then, after the White House meeting,” he accused the Ukrainian president of disrespect and said, “I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again… He either needs to resign and send somebody over that we can do business with or he needs to change.”
What changed? After decades of being at odds with Eurasia, now we have a president who embraces it, with the result that his cultish followers fall in line. Graham believes whatever it’s in his interest to believe.
My theory of what happened in the White House meeting is that Putin, nervous about the deal for Ukrainian metals that Trump and Zelensky were about to sign, flexed his influence over the president and his vice-president. In response, they found a way to blow up the meeting in the most public way possible and to kick Zelensky out of the White House. Longtime foreign policy experts report they’ve never seen such a thing.
David Rothkopf of the Daily Beast notes that Trump imagines himself as Don Corleone in The Godfather, pressing “for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate.” But Rothkopf says that it is actually Putin who is Don Corleone. Trump is just Luca Brasi, his enforcer:
[W]hile some on the right may be quietly cheering this new era of mafia-inspired testosterone-poisoned non-diplomacy, it would be a mistake to think of the Don in the White House as the Don Corleone of U.S. foreign policy. Considering where he gets his ideas and talking points and whose interests he serves, Trump is more the Luca Brasi of Putin foreign policy. Moronic muscle. An ignoramus with nukes.
And:
Trump is a paper tough guy. That was never more clear than on this infamous last Friday in February, when Trump revealed his decision to ally the United States with the most nefarious global criminal of our generation, Vladimir Putin, and to declare himself a lieutenant to the monstrous criminal enterprise on which Putin has focused throughout his two decades of dictatorship in Russia.
The comparison with Brasi doesn’t entirely work since the godfather’s henchman is a cold-blooded and very accomplished killer whereas Trump is just, well, “paper tough.” But one scene, which appears both in the book and in the movie, suggests that Rothkopf has gotten the parallel exactly right.
Brasi, despite his swagger, is so awed by the godfather, just as Trump is awed by Putin, that he falls all over himself to win his approval. At the wedding of the godfather’s daughter, he sucks up to Corleone by begging to be able to present the newlyweds with a large monetary gift. As you read the passage, imagine Brasi as Trump and Don Corleone as Putin:
Luca Brasi did not fear the police, he did not fear society, he did not fear God, he did not fear hell, he did not fear or love his fellow man. But he had elected, he had chosen, to fear and love Don Corleone. Ushered into the presence of the Don, the terrible Brasi held himself stiff with respect. He stuttered over the flowery congratulations he offered and his formal hope that the first grandchild would be masculine. He then handed the Don an envelope stuffed with cash as a gift for the bridal couple.
Trump’s own gift to godfather Putin is America’s leadership in the world. To which Putin responds (as does the godfather) with patronizing superiority:
The Don received Brasi as a king greets a subject who has done him an enormous service, never familiar but with regal respect.
Brasi, like Trump, falls all over himself in gratitude:
Hagen saw Luca Brasi’s face lose its mask of fury, swell with pride and pleasure, Brasi kissed the Don’s hand before he went out the door that Hagen held open.
So there you have it. Trump has chosen to grovel before Putin when it comes to foreign policy and before Elon Musk when it comes to domestic. He’s Luca Brasi times two and the intimidated GOP applauds.
Further thought: Another read on Lindsey Graham is that he’s not only a soulless apparatchik (although he is that) but also someone outraged that Zelensky is doing what he himself doesn’t have the guts to do, which is stand up to Trump. Driving his anger as the Ukrainian president is his shame.
