• US Presidential Election: Trump’s Self-Destruction?
  • Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive: Putin’s Third Major Humiliation
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla   Trump Throwing Away the Election?   Given the issues environment and the American national mood, Donald Trump should be the favourite to win back the White House for the Republicans in November. Instead according to American political campaign pundit Keith Naughton, he is running the most incompetent presidential campaign since Democrat George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide in 1972. “The list of foolish moves, dumb remarks and out-and-out stupidities is almost inexhaustible” (The Hill, Aug. 16). Naughton enumerates his top ten reasons why Trump is blowing it:
  1. Failing on Inflation
Inflation has been the top issue for all Americans, especially independents and Republicans. But Trump hasn’t seemed to notice, until recently. His advertising and his speeches barely touch on the topic, if at all. Where are the ads featuring people struggling with the household budget? Farmers and business owners crushed by rising costs? Not establishing that inflation was caused by excessive spending and regulation (of the Biden-Harris administration), as well as a plan to address it, has left a policy opening for Democrats for the past year. And now Harris is going to take advantage, with the predictable leftist complaints about excess profits and capitalist overreach. Greedflation may be a canard, but at least it’s something. Meanwhile Trump offers nothing. Well, maybe almost nothing. Trump’s plan is ordering his future Cabinet to figure it out, drill more oil (hard to say where, since American production is near an all-time high) and, of all things, to stop buying bacon!
  1. Where’s the vision?
Trump has become a collection of whines, insults and living in the past. He has done little to present a positive platform for a second term. His “proposals” are simple declarations. His line at the Republican (GOP) convention, “We’ll end lots of different things!” says it all.
  1. No strategy for undecided and independent voters
Neither Republicans nor Democrats represent anywhere close to a majority of voters. Independent voters will decide this presidential race. Yet Trump remains focused on his beloved base. He pounds away at illegal immigration and crime – important issues, but not the top issues for independents. That hold be inflation, health care and jobs. Trump can’t win without votes from people who don’t like him (including many Republicans), but he is doing nothing to woo those voters.
  1. Running as a reality TV candidate
US presidential campaigns and show business have much in common, but they are not the same. Trump has not figured this out. Winning elections requires a focus on a few crucial issues and attack lines. But Trump’s reality TV mindset means new content to keep people tuning in. His reality TV campaign plays out in his rallies, where he gets huge applause for his insult comic routine. But reality TV is not real life. Trump cannot win with just the rally vote.
  1. Obsessed with side issues
Crowd size, Harris’s ethnicity, Hannibal Lecter ( a fictional, cannibalistic serial killer) – Trump keeps wandering into one side issue after another. Maybe it’s “ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD) or maybe it’s just a symptom of old age, but it’s a disaster [for the Republicans!]. Even Trump loyalists say he needs to stick to the big issues, but he won’t – or can’t. Naughton suggests that it is high time that Trump receive a prescription for a central nervous system stimulant.
  1. Not turning the tables on the mainstream media
The media are a predictable bunch, as obsessed with their own hobbyhorses and grievances as any parochial group – and possibly out of touch with most Americans. Mixing it up with them should be an easy way to score political points. Instead, Trump blew an opportunity with the National Association of Black Journalists by not pointing out that nearly 30 Black Americans (2022 figures) are murdered every day, far more than the number of people killed at the infamous January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Also, Chicago residents were protesting migrant camps the year before. Why aren’t these Black journalists concerned about that?
  1. Trump can’t quit Biden
Joe Biden is not very relevant for the presidential campaign these days, now that his vice president has taken over the Democratic nomination. Yet Trump can’t stop talking about him. Yes, Democrats decided democracy is less important than winning by anointing Harris in a process as secretive as a papal election [Democracy was Biden’s pet theme]. And Trump was caught flat-footed. Did his team really think Democrats were not going to dump Biden? [The question was not if, but when and how?]. Even if they did, they should have been prepared for that contingency. Instead they were thinking and planning: The election is Trump’s to lose.
  1. Won’t get tough on Russia and Putin
Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin are incredibly unpopular: 76 % percent of independents think Russia is “unfriendly” or an “enemy”, along with 82 % percent of conservatives and 92 % percent of seniors. But Trump just will not come out strong against Putin, which hamstrings his ability to hit Biden or Harris on their frailty in Ukraine.
  1. Failing to attack Biden/Harris on electric cars
In March, the Biden administration set a deadline to cut gas-powered car sales in the U.S. in half. Electric vehicles are less labour-intensive and sure to result in job losses in the auto industry. Trump should be making “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris outlawing your job” a main talking point in Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump has also been soft on the United Automobile Workers union.
  1. Trump lacks Discipline
The former president’s indiscipline is really the biggest problem, but he is most certainly not changing on this front. Asking Trump to stick to a message, stop rage-posting and take advice is demanding too much! Incredibly, Trump did not bring illegal immigration into the equation. Nearly 17 million people may be in America illegally – that’s a lot of extra demand, especially for housing, where inflation has been particularly bad. Trump and his ramshackle campaign have had Issue Number One [illegal immigration] on their side for the last two years and have done nothing with it. It is the most striking example of messaging malpractice and political incompetence in decades. And it may very well cost him the presidency.   Ukraine Attacks Russia   Since the beginning of August, we are living in a different world. Ukraine has turned the tables and has now invaded Russia. It is now occupying a slice of Russian territory roughly the size of New York City. We are unaware of the military significance of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast (region, province), which marks the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since World War II. But judging from the Kremlin’s whiny initial response – in which Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top officials decried and downplayed the offensive as a “terrorist attack” and an “armed provocation” – the political fallout promises to be enormous, according to the New Atlanticist’s Brian Whitmore, Assistant Professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arliongton. Whitmore considers the invasion and occupation of parts of Kursk Oblast the third major military humiliation the Kremlin leader has suffered since launching his infamous full-scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022. # The first humiliation: February-September 2022 First, of course, there was the routing of Russian forces in the battle of Kyiv in the early phase of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The embarrassing withdrawal of Russian forces from near the Ukrainian capital in March 2022 was quickly followed by more military humiliations for the Kremlin, including Ukraine’s April 2022 sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. And if we thought it couldn’t get much worse for Russia than losing its flagship in a land war to a country without a navy, we would be wrong. In September and October 2022, Ukraine launched lightning counteroffensives to liberate large swaths of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions (Whitmore, Aug.15). The result of these first humiliations was, for lack of a better term, the shrinkage of Putin in the international arena. When Russia launched its invasion in the beginning of 2022, most analysts believed the war would be over in a matter of weeks! By the end of 2022, Russia’s war machine no longer looked invincible – instead, it looked quite fallible and beatable. And Putin no longer looked like a giant master strategist – instead he looked like a puny dwarf! The dismal performance of the Russian Armed Forces in 2022 weakened Putin domestically and divided the Russian elite into hawks, who wanted nothing short of the complete conquest of Kyiv, and kleptocrats, who wanted to go back to the prewar status quo. Ukrainian forces prevented Russia’s complete conquest, while Putin continued to isolate and impoverish his country, and therefore neither group was happy. Which set the stage for Putin’s next humiliation. # The second humiliation: June-August 2023 Putin’s second great military humiliation came not at the hands of Ukraine, but from his own inner circle. The June 2023 mutiny of Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his Kremlin-connected mercenary army, the Wagner Group, exposed deep cracks in the Russian political elite as well as the hollowness and rot of the Russian Armed Forces. The fact that Prigozhin, a Putin crony since the 1990s, would/could launch a rebellion against the Kremlin illustrated the peril’s of Putin’s “venture-capital foreign policy,” which outsources key military and security tasks to nominally private-sector actors. These informal patronage networks, in which Putin is the ultimate arbiter, only function well when the Russian leader is strong. When Putin is weak, it can lead to events like the Wagner Group mutiny. And the fact that Prigozhin could effectively take control of the city of Rostov-on-Don – to a hero’s welcome no less – and march his Wagner mercenaries north to the outskirts of Voronezh, roughly only three hundred miles from Moscow, further punctured Putin’s aura of omnipotence. Prigozhin, of course, paid the ultimate price for his mutiny. He died in a plane crash together with nine others, including Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, on August 23, 2023. The crash, to state the obvious, was definitely not an accident, but a Putin-style “termination” of friend turned foe. It was, according to sources in Western intelligence agencies, a political execution organized by longtime Putin aide Nikolai Patrushev. Putin’s second humiliation did not just deepen the divisions in Russia’s ruling elite exposed by the invasion of Ukraine. It also exposed the fundamental weakness of the armed forces in performing their core mission: protecting the homeland. And this in turn, set the stage for Putin’s most recent humiliation. # The third humiliation: The Guns of August 2024   The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ invasion of Kursk Oblast – conceived, planned, and executed in strict secrecy – came as a shock (not only to Russians) and instantaneously transformed the narrative of the war. Instead of the steady drumbeat of news about incremental Russian gains in the Donbas, a headline in the New York Times said it all: “Deception and a Gamble: How Ukrainian Troops Invaded Russia.” From the mass surrenders of unprepared and outmanned Russian troops, to the chaotic evacuation of civilians, to the steady advances of Ukrainian forces deeper into Russian territory, the Kursk operation exposed the weakness not just of the Russian Armed Forces, but of the Russian state itself. Over his more than two-decades rule, the Putin regime’s social contract with Russian society has been based on restoring lost greatness and reestablishing the [imperial and Soviet] empire. But today, it seems to have failed at achieving the most fundamental responsibility of state: protecting its territory and citizens from foreign invasion. And the fact that Putin is rumoured to have tasked one of his former bodyguards Aleksei Dyumin (whom some Russian Telegram channels have dubbed Russia’s “shadow defence minister”), with ending Ukraine’s cross-border offensive, suggests that panic is nin the air and that recently appointed Defence Minister Andrei Belousov may not be up to the task. The military fallout of Ukraine’s bold invasion of Russia is still unclear. It may turn out to be, as former US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Daniel Fried suggested, a George Washington “crossing the Delaware moment” of the American Revolutionary Wars. In a smart post on Substack, retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan noted that as a result of the incursion, Ukraine has options:
  • It can try to hold on to the territory it has seized.
  • It can retreat to more defensible positions inside Russia, or
  • It can withdraw to Ukraine fully after having embarrassed the Kremlin.
Putin, meanwhile, faces the difficult choice of whether to move troops from the front in eastern Ukraine to take back Russian territory in the Kursk region. Regardless of how this plays out militarily, the political damage is done, and is rooted in the nature of Russian politics. As Whitmore has written, under Putin, the Russian state has become, in essence, an organized crime syndicate. “Its internal logic, processes, incentive structure, and behavior resemble those of a Mafia family .  .  . “And the most destabilizing moment for a crime syndicate is when the Mafia boss looks weak”, (Whitmore). The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com