The Crossroads

No, Vladimir Putin does not have kompromat on trump. That’s not why trump consistently sides with him.

The explanation is much simpler: Trump idolizes Putin. He wants to be him.

Putin represents a kind of power trump has always admired—personal, unconstrained, untouchable. By many accounts, Putin is also extraordinarily wealthy, perhaps the richest man in the world. Trump has always been driven by that same obsession with wealth and status. Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly clear that Putin is not just a counterpart in trump’s mind, not just a model, but someone who provides trump with narcissistic supply, a drug trump needs to feel good about himself. It's that powerful.

In February 2022, just over four years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The expectation in Moscow was clear: Kyiv would fall in days, Zelensky would flee, and the Ukrainian government would collapse.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, the war dragged on. Ukraine defended itself with remarkable resilience. Zelensky emerged as one of the defining leaders of this moment. And Russia paid a staggering price in lives and resources, by some estimates an astounding 7,000 to 8,000 casualties per week.

How did Putin get it so wrong?

The answer is simple. He was working with a distorted version of reality.

Putin surrounded himself with loyalists who told him what he wanted to hear. They painted a picture that confirmed his assumptions and filtered out inconvenient truths. That is the Achilles’ heel of authoritarian systems. We saw it with Joseph Stalin. We saw it with Adolf Hitler. Over time, reality stops reaching the top.

Something similar—though not identical—is happening with trump.

He, too, has surrounded himself with people who reinforce his instincts rather than challenge them. That’s how he’s ended up in an unwinnable situation.

Yes, Benjamin Netanyahu likely played a role, pressing him to act and framing the moment as urgent. But that’s only part of the story. Trump was already predisposed toward confrontation with Iran. He’s spoken about it repeatedly. This isn’t new.

And now, once again, he’s backed himself into a corner, as he always does.

In trump’s mind, the instinct is to act like his idol—to double down, to project strength, to never retreat. But the United States is not Russia. Trump is not Putin. And now we're witnessing reality asserting itself.

The U.S. is at a crossroads.

On one side are regional allies and partners who expect follow-through and don’t want to be left exposed. On the other side are skyrocketing gas prices and rising costs, public anger, and a MAGA base that feels politically betrayed. 

My sense is that trump will do what he often does: declare victory and walk away, leaving others to deal with the disasterous consequences. It would be the smart move, because the alternative would be catastrophic.

Then again—when has trump ever chosen the smart move?