Not long before Putin ordered the total invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump praised the Russian dictator’s intention in a radio interview, from his Mar-a-Lago estate, portraying the dictator as a “genius” and a “peacemaker.”
Four years later, Vladimir Putin’s ‘genius’ can be measured as follows: over a million soldiers lost on the front (killed, wounded, missing), a devastated Russian economy, pariah status for both the country and the regime, a Kremlin penetrated by fear of declaring a second general mobilization, a dictator incapable of winning the war, or accepting peace.
And the no less painful or spectacular aspect is the following: at the beginning of 2026, Russia controls less Ukrainian territory than it occupied in the summer of 2022.
Indeed, it was a “genius” move, as Trump said, to lose more than a million people and ruin the national economy only to have accumulated less Ukrainian earth after four years than in the first phase of the invasion_ earth that was thrown over the decomposing bodies of your own troops.
The irony of fate is beyond expectations: even the Trump administration, through Secretary of State Rubio, admits the level of losses suffered by the Russians, thus confirming the assessments constantly made by Kiev.
You mobilize precious human and financial resources, you mess around and sacrifice everything, in order to obtain, in real terms, next to nothing – this is how the result of the brilliant dictator can be summarized.
Three years after that statement of fantastic imbecility (Putin, ‘a genius’ for invading), Donald Trump became president again.
It should be noted, that during his first term, Donald Trump had called himself “a very stable genius” – from which we can deduce, therefore, that in the dense mind of the US president, there are only two geniuses in this world: he, the autocrat in the making, and the other, the consecrated dictator.
The fact that Donald Trump chose Vladimir Putin as a model of good practices no longer surprises anyone today – in the last decade, he has issued dozens of admiring statements about the Kremlin leader.
But at the same time, the fact that Donald Trump chose such a specimen as a model of good practices and genius, was to his detriment.
Just a year after his return to the White House, Trump himself became a victim of the Putinist principle of “set everything on fire, everything, until your own house burns down.”
Unlike Putin, Trump did not start a war on the scale of the Russian-Ukrainian one, although, it is true, he initiated major armed attacks in two countries and tried to annex Greenland. Instead, the US leader has unleashed trade wars in all parts of the planet and has sown pain, suffering, probably even death in the most afflicted areas of the world, by dismantling USAID and in general the humanitarian support historically provided by the US.
The tariffs he imposed on the so-called “Liberation Day” (here is another similarity to Putin – the conflict nicknamed “liberation”) turned global trade, the US economy and America’s strategic alliances upside down. In other words, with the tariff match, Trump set fire to everything, absolutely everything.
The result, however, was no less similar to that achieved by Putin by resorting to the same type of scorching tactics.
Because, after a year of Trumpist tariffs, things are as follows:
- The fourth quarter was four times lower than Donald Trump’s aberrantly boastful estimates.
- The increase in new job creation has slowed dramatically.
- The trade deficit for 2025 has decreased and is today almost the same as that left by Biden, being lower by only 0.2%. This, in the context in which he obtained such a result with the remarkable price of blowing up both America’s credibility and alliances. Moreover, 0.2% is far from the long-promised 78% – the benefit obtained is 390 times!! lower than expected (sectorally, there were even areas where the trade deficit increased, despite tariffs).
- The Americans – importing companies and consumer citizens – have borne over 90% of this tax that Trump, by virtue of his functional illiteracy in terms of economics, continues to boast that he had imposed on foreign countries.
- In the end, the bulk tariffs were declared illegal by the Supreme Court – a crystal clear sign of the total incompetence of the Trump administration and at the same time a masterful pain in the future, because what was collected will have to be returned at some point.
- Not surprisingly, after only one year in office, Donald Trump collapsed in the polls (in all polls). Overall, the day before his State of the Nation address, Donald Trump was considered a disappointment by about two-thirds of Americans. From his economic policies and performances, to the way he has approached immigration and culminating in foreign policy priorities, the poll figures paint a portrait of an incapable, lying, cruel president who is out of touch with reality, a president who is not credible.
Like Putin, Trump first created a demented narrative (actually several) and just like Putin, he then set about bending reality in a way that made it fit the narrative.
The failure to mold reality into fiction had been predictable from the start in the case of Trump, as it had been predictable in the case of Putin.
Both, although in relatively different forms and in relatively different ways, have created conditions of destruction in many parts of the globe, have created conditions from bad to disastrous for their own fellow citizens and have swept away the status of pariah (of course, in this last chapter Putin still has a lead that is difficult to match).
It is clear that Donald Trump has chosen a profoundly uninspired model, it is clear that the term “genius”, as it occurs to the American president, is light years away from its coherent meaning in the realm of reality.
And it is also clear that Trump and Putin are notoriously incompetent in their roles – the former, as a businessman, in terms of understanding the economy; the second, as a KGB-ist, in terms of the understanding he had of the dynamics in Ukraine and Europe, at the time of the invasion.
When you are already a zero in your basic job (as is clear with both of them), it is impossible to become anything other than a nullity when you find yourself at the top of the professional pyramid, the president of a country.
We are today just three to four days away from the one-year anniversary of the geopolitical pornography exercise in the Oval Office, when the President of America tried to humiliate his Ukrainian counterpart.
What sweeter revenge could be for Zelensky than that of having resisted very well even with minimal American support? And not just of having resisted very well, but seeing the American president struggle more and more, and in a major decline?
