The Con and the Con Job: Trump Proves a Blowhard on Ukraine

Jeff Robbins on Jun 10, 2025

Last week we marked another anniversary of D-Day, the landing by Allied troops at Normandy, launched to liberate Europe from its murderous occupation by fascists. Thousands of young soldiers died in the initial phases of the campaign to free Europe; many thousands more would die before the Nazis surrendered.

Historically, June 6 is a date commemorated by American presidents, who point out how proud Americans should be to have stood up against tyrants. This year, not so much. Our sitting president, a convicted criminal who escaped with only 34 felony convictions by dint of the Royal Flush of political good fortune, used his family wealth to dodge the draft and has mocked those who in his view were foolish enough to have lost their lives serving their country. Having declared that he looked forward to being a "dictator" on day one of his second presidency, he has spent his first five months showing that, when he said he had absolute power as president, he meant it.

So as we pass June 6 and steam toward July 4, it's an awkward time for Americans to tout their past. Our current president's support for Russian totalitarian Vladimir Putin's attempt to violently strangle Ukraine -- support not merely tacit but explicit, not merely rhetorical but operational --- has stained America darkly. Celebration of America has been supplanted by shame.

Say this about Neville Chamberlain, the weak-kneed British Prime Minister who thought that by appeasing Adolf Hitler and handing him Czechoslovakia he could "make a deal" with him: there's no evidence that Chamberlain liked and admired Hitler, or wished him well in his future endeavors. By contrast, Donald Trump has made it crystal clear that he thinks highly of Putin, and believes that Ukraine, the victim of Putin's aggression, has somehow brought Putin's invasion on itself. It is a level of twisted that is hard to fathom, let alone untwist.

Reversing President Joe Biden's masterful orchestration of international military support for Ukraine, Trump cut off American military support and ended the crucial intelligence sharing so vital to Ukraine's self-defense. When totalitarians smile and their victims weep, it's a sorry time.

That's the large story. The lesser story is barely a story at all, which is Trump's relentless BS-ing of Americans about how he not only knew how to end the war started by Russia, but that he was going to do it before we could even say the words "bone spurs." CNN has documented 53 separate times during the last presidential campaign when Trump boasted that if elected he would end the war with Putin before even taking office or, at the very latest, "on day one" of his presidency. It's month five of Trump 2.0, and Russia, which is attacking Ukrainian civilians nightly as it occupies more and more Ukrainian territory, continues on, safe in the knowledge that America's president won't lift a finger to stop it.

America bought Trump's con-artistry hook, line and sinker. CNN was right: Trump's blowharding about his non-existent plan to end the war was a staple of his testosterone-suffused windbaggery during the campaign, and it was always the same.

"I'll get that done within 24 hours," Trump told one rally about ending the war. "Everyone says 'Oh, no, you can't.' Absolutely I can. Absolutely I can."

"I know Zelenskyy. I know Putin. It'll be done within 24 hours, you watch," he told another crowd. "They all say, 'That's such a boast.' It will be done very quickly."

Here was Trump during his debate with Biden: "I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on Jan. 20. I'll have that war settled. ... I will get it settled, and I'll get it settled fast before I take office."

And here he was during his debate with Kamala Harris: "I will get it settled before I even become president. I know Zelenskyy very well and I know Putin very well. I have a good relationship and they respect your president. Okay, they respect me; they don't respect Biden."

When it comes to Trump and Putin, it's not so much the lying as the appeasement that's the story. But journalist Bill Moyers was right when he observed "A democracy can die of too many lies." Best we absorb this before it's too late.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.