A Friendship Tested
I wonder whether it’s really true that then-President Trump sent his Russian counterpart covid testing machines for the latter’s personal use at the height of the pandemic.
I wonder not because I doubt the sourcing and investigative rigor of Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward, who after all has a pretty good track record in such matters.
I wonder because, if it’s true, this would be the first documented case of Donald Trump ever giving a crap about the personal welfare of another human being without there clearly being something in it for him.
In his new book, War, scheduled for release on October 15, Woodward further claims that Vladimir Putin — a known germophobe who reportedly was petrified of contracting the virus — responded to Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Aww! This exchange would be downright touching if it weren’t for the fact that Trump at the time was hastening the deaths of thousands of Americans through his utter mishandling of the crisis, and if Putin’s death from covid wouldn’t have blessedly spared Ukraine the devastation of an unprovoked Russian invasion.
According to Woodward, private citizen Trump has spoken with Putin as many as seven times since the former very reluctantly (shall we say) left the White House in January 2021. Teasers from Woodward’s book do not include excerpts from those conversations. Indeed, Woodward may not have been able to glean such details as whether the two men tee-heed about their little covid secret or exchanged testosterone-fueled accounts of how each man beat the coronavirus — Putin by cannily avoiding it and Trump by contracting and surviving it. It seems likely that Trump has bragged more recently about having survived an assassination attempt that nipped his ear. Putin’s presumed reply — that all of his would-be assassins are shot dead or fatally poisoned long before they get anywhere near him — surely elicited Trump’s envy. The exchange no doubt prompted a mental note by Trump to drastically revise presidential-protection protocols once he regains the presidency that was “stolen” from him four years ago.
Never mind those “beautiful letters” that then-President Trump exchanged with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. That was just a fleeting dalliance, it seems. We were not reading in yesterday’s Washington Post about Trump having sent personal-use covid-testing machines in 2020 to his portly pal north of the DMZ. Nor has Bob Woodward so much as hinted that private-citizen Trump has been dialing Kim in recent years on his pink princess phone — The Donald’s fluffy-slippered feet dangling off the bed at Mar-a-Lago — as he has Putin. (Sample imagined dialogue: TRUMP: “But do you think that Viktor O. likes likes me?” PUTIN: “There can be no doubt! As must President Lukashenko, or I will have him executed!”)
In Putin, Trump may at last have found an individual he considers a real friend. A person with whom Trump hopes one day to ride horses bare-chested on the Steppes. A partner in Diet Coke toasts among the gaudy furnishings at Trump’s south Florida mansion. Never mind that Putin’s motivation likely has more to do with flattering a useful dupe than with laying a foundation for future sweat-lodge bonding. This may simply be about Donald Trump having done a nice thing for a guy he cares about.
Ah, I know what you are thinking. And by that I don’t mean “It’s less that a month until a presidential election upon which the fate of American democracy arguably rests, and this is what’s top of mind to you?!”
No, what you’re probably thinking is, of course Trump’s concern for Putin’s welfare was, and is, transactional. Trump greatly admires Putin as crafter and enforcer of the kind of brook-no-dissent leadership model Trump aspires to install in the United States. Trump’s ego needs the praise and encouragement of this titan of totalitarianism. Were Putin to have been felled by covid, that approbation would have been silenced. That was the tit-for-tat in the covid-test gift, you might argue.
Well, maybe. But again: Why, of all the autocrats in all the gin joints in towns the world over, did Donald Trump send those covid-testing machines to just one guy, whose mailing address is The Kremlin?
I think it was because, in Donald Trump’s flinty heart, Vladimir Putin really is The Man — a friend he truly values. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually comes out that a vial of fresh-from-the-lab covid vaccine made its way to Moscow from Washington, as well — perhaps accompanied by a Trump-faced adhesive strip to cover the injection site.
It’s sort of nice to imagine that Trump being capable of largesse toward someone, anyone — especially given that he seems to regard the members of his own family as mere brand extensions. It’s why Woodward’s revelation about Trump, Putin and the covid-test machines gave me genuine pause when I first heard about it. It struck me as something weirdly new in the Trump story.
I might even have regarded it as a wee bit touching, if not, again, for those ugly details about the sender and the recipient. If not, ominously, for the fact that Donald Trump — perhaps incrementally humanized but still every bit the vengeance-fueled narcissistic sociopath — could, just a few weeks from now, be this nation’s president-elect.
