America is ruled by gangsters now

Three takeaways from Trump's disastrous meeting with Zelensky.

Over the past two days, almost everyone I know has been talking about Trump’s disastrous meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it is a conservative or a centrist. Absolutely no one thought the meeting went well. A couple of people said that Zelensky should have been less combative and more obsequious; no one praised Trump’s or JD Vance’s actions. Everyone is uneasy. Some are downright scared.

The MAGA apparatchiks are out in full force on social media, bellowing “America First!!”, praising Trump for what they think was a show of strength, and denouncing Zelensky at maximum volume. Republicans whom Trump has cowed into submission admitted the meeting was a disaster, but blamed the Ukrainian leader for failing to show Trump proper respect. But deep down, everyone who isn’t fully in the tank for Trump knows that this was a dark moment in American history.

Anyway, I encourage you to watch the whole meeting, if you have time. If you don’t have time, just watch the most important segment at the end, starting at around 43:00 in this video:

I’m not sure if there has ever been an event like this; I certainly have never seen one. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was for Zelensky to sign a deal in which Ukraine offers mineral rights in exchange for U.S. aid. But as the meeting goes on, it devolves into Trump and Vance aggressively berating Zelensky for what they claim is his failure to show proper respect and gratitude for U.S. aid. I’m sure that heads of state shout at each other and insult each other all the time behind closed doors, but I’ve never seen it done openly like this, in front of camera crews.

Immediately after this astonishing encounter, Trump announced that U.S. aid to Ukraine may now be halted completely.

Basically, I think there are three things we should take away from this disastrous event:

1. It’s now clear that the U.S. has chosen a set of leaders who are deeply immoral, and who cannot be expected to obey any norms of common decency.

2. U.S. foreign policy has changed dramatically from what it was from 1945 to 2024; the U.S. is now effectively a gangster state. It’s not clear whether this can ever durably revert back to the way it was.

3. Trump’s meeting with Zelensky also emphasizes how clumsy his administration is, and how they’ve already started making mistakes.

America is now being led by its least moral individuals

I’m going to talk about the geopolitical and domestic political implications of Trump’s Zelensky meeting in a bit, but first I want to place Trump and Vance’s contempt for Ukraine in the context of something else that’s been bothering me more and more recently — a general collapse of America’s public morality.

The world is not made up of heroes and villains, like in Star Wars or a Marvel movie. Instead, like the Game of Thrones universe or a dark edgy comic book, the world is made up of antiheroes and villains. The kindest person you ever meet will have some moments of cruelty in their life; even the most upright and honest bend the rules once in a while; even people fighting for noble causes will have times when they’re selfish, arrogant, and greedy.

And yet even so, there are enormous moral differences between individual human beings. There are people for whom greed, selfishness, and cruelty are not occasional lapses, but a way of life. There are true villains in this world. Everyone knows this on some level, and we’ve organized large parts of our societies around trying to police the true villains and keep them from attaining power. But society is always at a disadvantage, because villains work around the clock; people who crave power and dominance spend all of their waking hours trying to get it, while normal, flawed people can only spend part of their time policing them.

If normal people were heroes, it would be easier to keep villains out of power. But normal people are antiheroes — they will kowtow to power when sufficiently threatened, they will take a bribe if it’s sufficiently large. Every man has his price, and the villains have deep pockets.

And the villains have a lot of practice using normal people’s flaws to divide them. When society is politically divided, power-hungry people exploit those divisions to rise to the top — we tell ourselves “He may be a bad guy, but he’s a bad guy on my side.” At least Hitler will fight the communists; at least Stalin will keep the capitalists at bay.

And like a movie antagonist who says “We’re not so different, you and I,” real villains are always screaming at the top of their lungs about the tiniest flaw in the moral character of their opponents. If Star Wars were real, the galactic internet would be flooded with screeching tirades about Han Solo’s criminal past, how Princess Leia got her position through nepotism, or how Luke Skywalker once made out with his sister.

Americans who pay attention to the news — conservatives and liberals alike — are slowly starting to realize that the people we’ve put in charge of our country are among our morally worst.

The Trump administration was probably responsible for allowing Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, two online influencers who are being prosecuted for human trafficking in Romania, to leave that country and stay in the U.S. (Tate has also been accused of multiple rapes and assaults in the UK). Here is a video where Andrew Tate describes beating up women. Some quotes from the video:

“Here’s a little move. When I’ve got you by the neck and you start annoying me, trying to resist, and I just BOOM! And then I grab you by your neck again. Then what the fuck you gonna do, when your face is collapsed, and your fucking cheekbones broken, you ain’t gonna do shit but cry!”…

“I don’t even have to fuck you. Forget the sex part, that’s a distraction. My dick can stay in my pants, I’ll just start beatin’ the shit out of you, how about that, we walk in the bedroom, I start kicking your ass…Bet you cry then!”

And so on. This man has been lionized by MAGA media, including Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Benny Johnson. Elon Musk has endorsed Tate for prime minister of the UK.

If this shocks or surprises you, it really shouldn’t. It has been almost a decade now since everyone heard a tape of Trump talking about grabbing women “by the pussy”. Trump’s first nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, had to withdraw because of allegations that (among other things) he had sex with a 17-year-old; he was once investigated for human trafficking. Many other Trump nominees have been accused of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and so on.

Nor is sexual misconduct the only sort of immorality the MAGA movement has defended. There’s also financial fraud and corruption. Trump just halted the fraud prosecution of Chinese crypto magnate Justin Sun, who bought a bunch of Trump’s memecoins, thus pushing up their price and adding enormously to Trump’s personal fortune (something I warned about in a post a month ago).