It was ten years ago yesterday when Hillary Clinton told us that, if DJT were elected, Vladimir Putin would have a puppet in the White House. The accusation came in their debate after Trump refused to disavow Russia, saying that it would not be a bad thing if Russian and the United States got along. When he said that Putin had no respect for Clinton, she responded, “That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president.”
This has not only proved to be spot-on but it becomes truer with every passing week. Heather Cox Richardson points to some of the strings that Putin has pulled in the last few days:
In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.
I went looking for poems about puppets and came across a gem by Angelina Weld Grimké. Born in 1880, Grimké was the mixed-race daughter of a former slave-abolitionist pairing and the grandniece of the famous 19th century abolitionist and suffragist Angelina Grimké Weld. The poet’s racial background must have created a sense of distance from both white and Black societies, whose elaborate responses to racial codes made them appear stiff and unnatural:
The Puppet-Player
Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player, A clenched claw cupping a craggy chin Sits just beyond the border of our seeing, Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.
The puppet imagery reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” where he describes dancers as automatons when viewed through a curtain at night:
Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons, Slim silhouetted skeletons Went sidling through the slow quadrille.
While Grimké was perhaps thinking of Americans responding to racism, her poem describes Putin perfectly as a puppet-player. She even gets the “slow sardonic grin” right. Meanwhile Trump, when he does his little inane dance step, appears to be pulled by strings.
Thanks to the GOP’s refusal to hold DJT accountable for his open corruption, Putin differs from Grimké’s puppet-master only in that he has no need to hide his manipulation. We don’t have to look beyond the border to see him at work.
