Flattery gets one everything if you're Putin or Trump
By Sid Schwab / Herald Columnist
The murder of Charlie Kirk makes me feel ill. So does Elon Musk’s response to it. Other than that, I have nothing useful to say. So we move on.
Donald Trump’s recent made-for-MAGA “Cabinet Meeting” was nothing about policy and everything about serial assculation, a showcase of Trump’s bottomless need for fawning sycophancy. If MAGAs don’t see it for what it is, namely a gaping vulnerability in an American “president,” other world leaders do.
Like many clear-eyed observers of Trump’s obsequious deference to Vladimir Putin, I once assumed there must be blackmail behind it. The rumored “pee tape,” for example, or recordings of likely “ungentlemanly” behavior while he was in Russia, tending to his Miss America ladies. There were hidden recording devices in my room in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow while on tour in college, so I’m certain there are recordings of Trump when he was there, too, whatever the content. I was talking with a young artist, wrongly unworried about speaking in my room, who spoke longingly of America, where artists are free to create. Immediately after accompanying us to the train station, he was arrested.
The recent showcase in Beijing, featuring Valdimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Kim Jong-un, and representatives of many other countries, including some of our pre-Trump allies, all aligning with China’s Xi Jinping, made me realize Putin didn’t need blackmail to get what he wanted from Trump. For Putin, a former KGB operative trained to take the measure of people, sizing up Trump was easy as pierogi. He saw a man so in need of flattery, so prone to bragging undeservedly and lying unreservedly, that manipulating him must have been lesson one of KGB Spying 101. So, seizing the opportunity fate handed him, using fake media and other methods, he helped to get him elected.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/schwab-flattery-gets-one-everything-if-youre-putin-or-trump/
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