Old Think New Think
One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.
One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.
The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.
People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.
Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.
Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.
Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.
Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.
The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.
In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.
This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.
Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.