Simplicius: SITREP 8/28/25: Trump Scoffs at Russian Interests in Gross Display of Hubris (excerpt)
By Simplicius, Substack, 8/27/25
Trump made a very interesting comment during a press conference yesterday (8/26/25) which entirely summarizes the West’s misguided approach to Russia:
Trump is asked on his opinion regarding Lavrov’s statement that Russia could not sign a deal with an illegitimate leader like Zelensky. Trump responds by saying such statements are irrelevant because “everyone is just posturing”, and “it’s all bullshit”.
Trump could not be more wrong that a civilizational state like Russia is merely “posturing” about its existential interests, and understanding this key divergence is essential for grasping the far larger implications of the ideological rift between West and East.
It also explains why observers have been tearing their hair out trying to comprehend why Russia’s consistently clear elucidations of its demands always seemingly fall on deaf ears. Russia issues the exact bullet point reduction of its demands, and the very next day Trump’s various reps and envoys muddle things by claiming they aren’t sure what Russia wants, or that a meeting is needed to further iron things out.
Trump demystifies things by explaining that these weren’t misunderstandings or a US inability to properly listen to Russia’s demands—even worse, these were outright US dismissals of Russian concerns all along. In Trump’s decadent, reality-TV-inspired world view, every global conflict is just another daytime soap opera production you can throw enough money at, ‘rizz’ up its hosts, and things fall into place.
He cannot seem to grasp the existential implications for the parties involved, a theme I recently alluded to:
The world’s a stage for silver-spooned Donnie, and its ‘inconvenient’ conflicts mere sideshows to be quickly dispensed with for the prize of accolades. That is what being uncultured gets you—the inability to understand rooted histories, barring the odd toss-off like “these people have been fighting for thousands of years” that Riviera Don occasionally rattles off about Gaza in pale imitation of erudition.
This is likely the real reason for Putin’s infamously pedantic exegesis on Russian history for Tucker Carlson, to signal to Western audiences that the conflict has much deeper roots and implications than their leaders are willing to admit.
Another implication of Trump’s crude dismissal of Russian legal objections has to do with the same so-called ‘Rules Based Order’ so often pedestaled as the sacred geometry on which the entire Western system rests. Trump callously pulls at the threads of this Order’s very seams by ignoring clearly legitimate concerns about one of the party’s legal standings, again signifying to the world that the ordurous odor coming from this Order is one of fickle arbitrariness and hypocrisy.
On the occasion of shedding light on this ideological divide between Russia and the West, it is interesting that Putin had just recently again shared his views on the origins of the West’s demonization of Russia. Many have debated this for years, citing Russia’s fraternal involvement with both US and UK in previous centuries and often attributing the ‘fall’ to the pre-WWI, Milner’s Roundtable and Mackinder’s “Heartland” years.
But Putin, for his part, traces the lineage of this schismatic hatred much farther back, to the days of Ivan IV, when he believes Papal representatives sought to convince Russia to shed its Orthodoxy, to no avail. After Ivan IV’s rebukes, Putin says the first inklings of the now-notorious “otherness” began to be applied to Russia, with Ivan deemed to be a mad tyrant and branded ‘the Terrible’.
So, how did we get from Trump’s casual table rants to plumbing historical myths? The underlying continuity can be explained simply: the West does not understand Russia, and does not care to understand it. This comes from an ingrained superiority complex and exceptionalism dating back centuries.
Rhetorical question: How can you resolve a conflict between two parties whose deepest cultural, spiritual, and geopolitical epistemologies you shroud in deliberate obfuscation?….
