Not that I want to make a habit of this, but…
Nothing instills fear and trembling among allies and enemies alike better than the President of the United States of America winging foreign policy. Consider his comments today from his golf outing to Scotland, apparently abandoning the 50-day deadline he set 13 days ago for Russia to agree to a cease-fire with Ukraine in the war Trump said his brilliant leadership and universal respect would end over 189 days ago:
“I’m going to make a new deadline of about 10… uh, 10 or 12 days from today. There’s no reason in waiting… there’s no reason in waiting. It’s 50 days, I want to be generous, but… uh, we just don’t see any progress being made” [Donald Trump, photo op with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, transcribed from Fox News video, 2025.07.28, timestamp ~12:00].
10 or 12 days from today? That’s not a deadline. That’s not a well-thought-out strategy. That’s just the latest random crap that poured out from Trump’s muddy head when he opened his mouth.
Ukraine shouldn’t get too excited. Minutes later, responding to a reporter’s question about his apparent frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump declined to say Putin had lied to him and said he thought that on three separate occasions he came away from “a good talk” with his Russian counterpart and “it seemed that we were going to have a cease-fire and maybe peace and you divide it up and you do whatever you have to do to get to the end….”
Divide it up… Trump means Ukraine, and he said this with a casual shrug, as if the dismantling of a sovereign democratic nation to reward Russian imperialism and burnish his own dealmaking rep is no big deal.
But whatever turn in policy Trump is suggesting, he clearly hasn’t thought it through enough to even set a firm date. Imagine what a real President would have said in response to Russia’s continued aggression:
Despite sincere overtures of peace from all other parties, from the U.S., from our European allies, from Ukraine itself, which has defied the odds and fought Russia’s naked aggression its own soil for nearly three and a half years, Russia remains committed to a policy of warfare against Ukraine. Most grievously, Russia continues to target and slaughter civilians in a clear campaign of terror.
Today our overtures end. We recognize the futility of asking Putin for peace. We now demand it. Not 50 days from now, not 12 or 10. We—and by we, I mean not myself, not the United States alone, but the U.S., the U.K., the E.U., all the free nations of the world—demand that Russia end its aggression now. Today. This moment. No more missiles. No more drones. No more North Korean shock troops on Ukrainian soil. We demand that Russia turn its troops around and head east, back across the border, back to Russia. We demand that Russia leave every square centimeter of Ukrainian soil, including occupied Crimea, and allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace in the land that is rightfully theirs.
To motivate this immediate cease-fire and retreat, we are announcing a new foreign policy initiative. After months of close consultation, the members of NATO have agreed to invite Ukraine to join its military alliance. The European Union has also agreed to invite Ukraine to join its economic union. We expect to formalize NATO membership for Ukraine by the end of this week. The E.U. will establish a separate timeline, but officials in Brussels say Ukraine may join as a full member by the end of this year.
NATO membership will bring immediate protection and military support to the brave Ukrainian armed forces. To realize this support, we last night deployed a special NATO task force of 40,000 troops, a combined force consisting of American, British, French, German, Polish, and Norwegian soldiers, to Kyiv. Another 40,000 NATO troops will land in Ukraine within 48 hours and take forward defensive positions in eastern Ukraine.
Any Russian forces found on Ukrainian soil in the next 48 hours doing anything other than surrendering or moving east fast will be considered hostile, and NATO forces will assist Ukraine in neutralizing those hostiles.
As NATO establishes its defensive presence, the E.U., with significant financial support from the U.S. and U.K., will launch an immediate Marshall Plan for Ukraine to rebuild the energy infrastructure, industrial facilities, agricultural production, and transportation and information infrastructure that Russia has damaged in its invasion. This Marshall Plan for Ukraine will be supported by billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets that Putin has forfeited with his unjustified aggression.
We should have implemented this plan three years ago. We should not have left Ukraine to struggle alone against Russian imperialism. We apologize deeply for our delay and for our error in thinking that a tyrant like Putin would see reason and abandon his violent folly. We end our error now. We thank Ukraine for its brave service in resisting Putin’s attempt to reawaken the Russian imperial bear, and we join Ukraine now in chasing that bear back into its cage so that Ukraine, Europe, and the civilized world may live without fear of being next on Putin’s murderous agenda.
Such is the plan a real President would have been working on with expert advisors and allies to announce with a firm timeline and firm action.
Instead we get a senile narcissist who improvs flimsy deadlines before trundling off to his truly pressing business of promoting his newest private golf course on the American taxpayers’ dime (actually, 97 million dimes, which Trump could easily cover from proceeds from his other course in Scotland, which charges $1,296 for a morning round of golf).