President Trump recently compared the Russo-Ukrainian war to a quarrel between children in a playground. “Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” he said. “They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled, sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while.”
The comparison is obscenely inappropriate, of course — reducing Russia’s genocidal aggression to “fighting like crazy” and Ukrainian resistance to complicity in the fisticuffs. To get a sense of how profoundly disturbing the comparison is, apply it to Hitler’s “fight” with Europe’s Jews.
That said, it’s obviously pointless to accuse Trump of historical ignorance or moral obtuseness. Both features define his core of advisors — a cynical analyst might even suggest this is part of their job description.
What is less obvious is the fact that the comparison is spot-on with respect to Trump’s relations with his newfound frenemy Elon Musk.
The Trump-Musk breakup was predictable. The White House isn’t big enough for two self-styled geniuses. The form the breakup assumed was equally predictable, at least in retrospect.
Mudslinging, slurs and insults are part of each man’s rhetorical arsenal. Musk, however, made the most damaging accusation, claiming that Trump was “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the prominent men named in legal documents linked to Jeffrey Epstein, the high-society millionaire accused of sex-trafficking underage girls for the rich and famous.
Like Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s coordinated Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump’s spat with Musk made for “great television.” It also made for dreadful reality. It is deeply worrisome for two of the most powerful men in the world, on whom the fate of billions of people arguably depends, to behave like playground brats.
Children shouldn’t be running countries, corporations or departments of government efficiency. But again, this observation is nothing new, having been made thousands of times with no appreciable effect.
Unfortunately, the world cannot follow Trump’s advice with respect to Russia and Ukraine: “Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while.”
Russia’s genocidal war is no children’s quarrel. It can be stopped only if Trump’s and Steve Witkoff’s good friend Vladimir Putin is made to stop it. Walking away and “letting them fight for a while” isn’t just morally obscene. It’s also politically suicidal for the world, the U.S. and Russia included.
Allowing nations to gain territory through force would open a Pandora’s box of instability and war, which, given America’s presence in much of the world, will inevitably drag it in. Encouraging Russia to pursue imperialism in its backyard is to involve Putin’s realm in fighting for a very long while.
But the world can follow Trump’s advice with respect to Trump and Musk. The longer and nastier their relations, the worse for both — and the better for America and the world.
The spat has revealed the many cracks in Trump’s seemingly monolithic administration. After Musk demonstrates that opposition is possible, these cracks will only multiply and grow larger, thereby hamstringing the White House and preventing it from pursuing its revolutionary agenda at home and its counterproductive foreign policy abroad.
One could almost sympathize with Trump’s movement supporters, were it not for their complicity in Trump’s policies. They thought that their omniscient and omnipotent hero was anointed by none other than God. And instead of behaving like an adult missionary, he’s behaving like a frustrated toddler.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
