Donald Trump made big news last week — and it wasn’t his conviction on 34 counts in Manhattan on Thursday.
It’s what Trump said a few days before. According to the Kyiv Independent’s retelling of a May 28 story in the Washington Post, the former and possibly future president “suggested at a fundraising event that he would have bombed Moscow in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” He also said he would “attack Beijing if China invaded Taiwan on his watch.”
Surprisingly, Trump’s comments didn’t appear to ring alarm bells in the American media, perhaps because we’re used to him making outrageous statements that may or may not mean anything. But his bellicose language about China may mean that he’s serious about bombing Moscow were it to engage yet again in some egregious form of aggression, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
In effect, Trump’s comments made him into America’s equivalent of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s loony former president and prime minister who regularly threatens the West with nuclear incineration. Here’s a recent gem: “The choir of irresponsible bastards from among Western elites calling for sending their troops to the nonexistent country [i.e., Ukraine] is expanding. … In that case, none of them will be able to hide either on Capitol Hill, or........