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volodymyr zelenskyy
America’s Toddler-in-Chief: When Personal Grievance Becomes National Policy
If progressives hope to counter Trump effectively, we must remember: We are not simply debating policy, we are confronting a man whose every political act is an attempt to soothe his private wounds.
Oct 04, 2025
If someone treats us badly or hurts our feelings, we feel resentful. Such a response is a normal and hard-wired reaction to experiences of rejection, neglect, and criticism. Such resentment might be a passing feeling or it might endure over time. Despite being advised to practice “forgiveness,” it’s possible or even probable that most of us, on some level, remember and keep alive our grievances, usually harboring them in private.
But do you know what normal people don't do? We don't draw up an “enemies list,” and make it our mission in life to exact retribution of some kind. If we do, we're weird and a bit crazy.
Welcome to the psychological world of President Donald Trump. He kicks Jimmy Kimmel off the air because Kimmel makes fun of him. He brings charges against James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and the “Biden crime family” because they were critical of him and judged him. When California Gov. Gavin Newsom mocks him, his response is to proudly come up with the nickname, “Gavin Newscum.” He threatens General Mark Milley with “execution” and makes jokes about the violent attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband. In response to Bruce Springsteen’s critiques from the stage in Manchester, UK, he attacked the Boss in a highly personal, peculiar, and bizarre way, posting this on Truth Social: “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out 'prune' of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT!” Trump’s actions and reactions to challenges or criticism of any kind come from an extremely personal, private, and insecure place, reminiscent of kids slinging insults in a schoolyard.
In other words, Trump turns everything political into something personal. His personal psychology is on display in his public actions all the time—it’s hiding in plain sight. And any guardrails or censor that should normally maintain a screen or at least some separation between his personal psychology and his public role have completely disintegrated, if it they were ever there to begin with. A leader unable to keep these two domains separate is invariably weakened and ineffective, and we’re all paying the price for this breakdown.
Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action.
A senior consultant in Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation used to teach progressive leaders that there is—and should be—a difference between public and private values, that in private life, relationships are ends in themselves while for public actors, relationships are, and should be, more instrumental and transactional. Self-sacrifice is normal in personal relationships, while self-interest guides public action. For political leaders, personal gratification should take a backseat to public service. Of course, there is often a blurring of these boundaries, but, in general, when these domains get too confused, the consequences are usually disastrous. We see in Donald Trump an extreme example of what happens when someone in public is unable to separate the pressures of his or her private psychology and public actions.
In Donald Trump’s world, the political is always personal. Barriers between the two worlds, the sort of censors and self-restraint that effective leaders are obligated to exercise in public life, have completely collapsed. You don’t need to be Freud to see how much his policies are suffused with his personal and private needs, defenses, and insecurities. He attacks Canada because its leaders had a “nasty” response to his suggestion that it become our 51st state. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “disrespectful,” and so Trump withholds aid. His ignorance about policy reflects the fact that he recklessly acts on private impulses and not thoughtful reflection. He lies compulsively and continually, and always in the service of bombastic claims of perfection and self-exoneration. He frees criminals and criminalizes dissent, not out of high-minded principles but out of base impulses involving his personal narcissistic needs and vulnerabilities—not public interests.
Obviously, public figures and leaders are human beings with personal psychologies that invariably influence their public political actions. Effective leaders, however, learn to subordinate or at least sublimate personal psychological conflicts in the interest of being politically strategic, negotiating compromises, and focusing in a laser-like way on those desirable political outcomes that serve a broader good. No one is saying that politicians leave their egos at the door, but, rather, that the best ones seek to restrain these egos in order to achieve their political goals.
Trump is the opposite. He acts (out) entirely on the basis of personal animus and internal conflicts and then, only retroactively, spins a tale that paints his words and actions as principled or visionary. He will act on a small-minded personal impulse like humiliating Zelenskyy (who was “disrespectful”) in the Oval Office, but then argue that what was clearly an idiosyncratic personal response was really part of his efforts to single-handedly solve the Ukraine-Russian war and insure world peace. He feels slighted by other world leaders and then reactively trash talks them in public, all the while implying that his derogatory language and claims are really part of his efforts to make America great again and to promote a high-minded “America First” agenda without a hint of awareness that the real psychic motivation behind his actions involves making him, on a purely personal level, “great” and “first.”
The nature of the psychological engine that drives Trump to so constantly leak his personal issues onto his public political postures, the real reasons he simply cannot keep the seamier sides of his psychology from flooding his actions as president, all stem from his core psychological makeup. Again, let’s be clear: Trump’s psychology is hiding in plain sight. This isn’t some long-distance psychiatric conjecture or diagnosis. Trump is driven to avoid or refute any situation, any moment, in which he might potentially feel or be seen as one-down, inadequate, inferior, or otherwise a failure. He lives in dire fear of such feelings and instinctively, automatically, and desperately has to go out of his way to communicate the opposite. We see it every day. We see it in Trump’s constant clownish boasting and self-aggrandizing arrogance. When the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal suggested business sentiment had soured in response to his tariffs, Trump lashed back, calling it "globalist," "antiquated," and "very bad for the USA"—before promising, absurdly, that "we will WIN on everything!!!”
Everyone is so used to Trump’s compulsive sense of grievance and defensive arrogance that it no longer seems to be as much the impairment that it actually is. No one blinks an eye when he makes remarks, barely concealed within his word salad, about “having the best words,” being “the best President for black people since Abraham Lincoln,” or knowing more about taxes, the military, climate change—well, pretty much everything—than the world’s experts.
My point here is that Trump has no choice, no freedom at all, to edit or censor remarks like these because the psychic threats they seek to mitigate—feelings of shame, inferiority, or failure—are so threatening to him that they leave him no room at all to be cautious, modest, or to seek common ground. While all politicians, like all people, bring their personal psychologies into their public work lives, Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action.
This is exactly why Trump can’t tolerate Newsom’s mocking tweets. They hit him exactly where it hurts the most, namely, his ego, his narcissism, and his profound insecurities connected to feeling small, to being seen in any way as a loser. And this is the precise tone that those of us in the progressive opposition should take when we challenge the Trump regime in public.
There is nothing funny, nothing at all, about the systemic harm that Trump is inflicting on all of us. And our struggle to repair and reverse such harm involves gaining and wielding political power and not psychiatric explanation. But if progressives hope to counter Trump effectively, we must remember: We are not simply debating policy. We are confronting a man whose every political act is an attempt to soothe his private wounds. Exposing that truth is not a sideshow. It is part of the strategy.
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Trump Tries to Spin Failed Putin Peace Summit as Critics Label It a 'Self-Own'
"Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump," wrote one critic.
Aug 16, 2025
US President Donald Trump on Saturday morning tried to put his best spin on a Friday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that yielded neither a cease-fire agreement nor a comprehensive peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Writing on his Truth Social page, the president took a victory lap over the summit despite coming home completely empty-handed when he flew back from Alaska on Friday night.
"A great and very successful day in Alaska!" Trump began. "The meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia went very well, as did a late night phone call with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and various European Leaders, including the highly respected Secretary General of NATO."
Trump then pivoted to saying that he was fine with not obtaining a cease-fire agreement, even though he said just days before that he'd impose "severe consequences" on Russia if it did not agree to one.
"It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Cease-fire Agreement, which often times do not hold up," Trump said. "President Zelenskyy will be coming to DC, the Oval Office, on Monday afternoon. If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin. Potentially, millions of people's lives will be saved."
While Trump did his best to put a happy face on the summit, many critics contended it was nothing short of a debacle for the US president.
Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Glasser argued that the entire summit with Putin was a "self-own of embarrassing proportions," given that he literally rolled out the red carpet for his Russian counterpart and did not achieve any success in bringing the war to a close.
"Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the 'brotherly' Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska," she wrote. "The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer."
She also noted that Trump appeared to shift the entire burden of ending the war onto Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and he even said after the Putin summit that "it's really up to President Zelenskyy to get it done."
This led Glasser to comment that "if there's one unwavering Law of Trump, this is it: Whatever happens, it is never, ever, his fault."
Glasser wasn't the only critic to offer a scathing assessment of the summit. The Economist blasted Trump in an editorial about the meeting, which it labeled a "gift" to Putin. The magazine also contrasted the way that Trump treated Putin during his visit to American soil with the way that he treated Zelenskyy during an Oval Office meeting earlier this year.
"The honors for Mr. Putin were in sharp contrast to the public humiliation that Mr. Trump and his advisers inflicted on Mr. Zelenskyy during his first visit to the White House earlier this year," they wrote. "Since then relations with Ukraine have improved, but Mr. Trump has often been quick to blame it for being invaded; and he has proved strangely indulgent with Mr. Putin."
Michael McFaul, an American ambassador to Russia under former President Barack Obama, was struck by just how much effort went into holding a summit that accomplished nothing.
"Summits usually have deliverables," he told The Atlantic. "This meeting had none... I hope that they made some progress towards next steps in the peace process. But there is no evidence of that yet."
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Ukraine Must Be Included in Trump-Putin Peace Talks, Says Sanders
The senator said the negotiations could be "a positive step forward" after three and a half years of war.
Aug 10, 2025
Echoing the concerns of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders about an upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday said the interests of Ukrainians must be represented in any talks regarding an end to the fighting between the two countries—but expressed hope that the negotiations planned for August 15 will be "a positive step forward."
On CNN's "State of the Union," Sanders (I-Vt.) told anchor Dana Bash that Ukraine "has got to be part of the discussion" regarding a potential cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine, which Putin said last week he would agree to in exchange for major land concessions in Eastern Ukraine.
Putin reportedly proposed a deal in which Ukraine would withdraw its armed forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, giving Russia full control of the two areas along with Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
On Friday, Trump said a peace deal could include "some swapping of territories"—but did not mention potential security guarantees for Ukraine, or what territories the country might gain control of—and announced that talks had been scheduled between the White House and Putin in Alaska this coming Friday.
As Trump announced the meeting, a deadline he had set earlier for Putin to agree to a cease-fire or face "secondary sanctions" targeting countries that buy oil from Russia passed.
Zelenskyy on Saturday rejected the suggestion that Ukraine would accept any deal brokered by the U.S. and Russia without the input of his government—especially one that includes land concessions. In a video statement on the social media platform X, Zelenskyy said that "Ukraine is ready for real decisions that can bring peace."
"Any decisions that are against us, any decisions that are without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace," he said. "Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier."
Sanders on Sunday agreed that "it can't be Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump" deciding the terms of a peace deal to end the war that the United Nations says has killed more than 13,000 Ukrainian civilians since Russia began its invasion in February 2022.
"If in fact an agreement can be negotiated which does not compromise what the Ukrainians feel they need, I think that's a positive step forward. We all want to see an end to the bloodshed," said Sanders. "The people of Ukraine obviously have got to have a significant say. It is their country, so if the people of Ukraine feel it is a positive agreement, that's good. If not, that's another story."
A senior White House official told NewsNation that the president is "open to a trilateral summit with both leaders."
"Right now, the White House is planning the bilateral meeting requested by President Putin," they said.
On Saturday, Vice President JD Vance took part in talks with European Union and Ukrainian officials in the United Kingdom, where Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President in Ukraine, said the country's positions were made "clear: a reliable, lasting peace is only possible with Ukraine at the negotiating table, with full respect for our sovereignty and without recognizing the occupation."
European leaders pushed for the inclusion of Zelenskyy in talks in a statement Saturday, saying Ukraine's vital interests "include the need for robust and credible security guarantees that enable Ukraine to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity."
"Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a cease-fire or reduction of hostilities," said the leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Cancellor Friedrich Merz, and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. "The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force."
At the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, British journalist and analyst Anatol Lieven wrote Saturday that the talks scheduled for next week are "an essential first step" toward ending the bloodshed in Ukraine, even though they include proposed land concessions that would be "painful" for Kyiv.
If Ukraine were to ultimately agree to ceding land to Russia, said Lieven, "Russia will need drastically to scale back its demands for Ukrainian 'denazification' and 'demilitarization,' which in their extreme form would mean Ukrainian regime change and disarmament—which no government in Kyiv could or should accept."
A recent Gallup poll showed 69% of Ukrainians now favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible. In 2022, more than 70% believed the country should continue fighting until it achieved victory.
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