Trump and Putin — one talk is not day one

And, that precaution in the header is not just for the MAGAts but also the Simplicius types, who thought they had Trump pegged.

In reality, going behind the Reuters story?

We know that Trump's incoming administration was behind the late-Biden team's final energy sanctions on Russia. We know that Trump has not lifted them. We know that, while Trump and Elmo have paused, scrambled and fucked up foreign aid in general, Trump has not stopped sending bombs to Ukraine.

For the Simplicius types, those are all facts on the ground.

Trump and his team's general statements, from Jan. 1 on, before he officially was sworn in, come off as various ploys on trying to buffalo Putin. John Mearsheimer has talked about that on at least one dialogue with Andrew Napolitano. (Both also mentioned his cluelessness in claiming 1 million Russians have been killed.)

The new reality appears to be (I have to say "appears to be" because I'm not a Russia or Putin expert and nobody is a Trump expert) is that Trump seems to be accepting that the buffaloing has failed — or, at a minimum, that's failed without an accompanying "good cop" second track.

So, Trump's team and Putin's are talking. As noted above, buffaloing may resume in the future. If so, it will fail again.

Or, maybe they're not talking. Kremlin spox Dmitri Peskov refuses to confirm or deny any conversations. Putin will let Trump twist slowly in the wind a bit.

By the start of Ukrainian-Russian spring, when the possibility of events on the battlefield will start up again, Trump (or people working around him) will accept that buffaloing won't work, period. At that point, having wasted months already, they'll finally get around to talking more seriously to Zelensky. How those talks proceed then will depend on the start of this week's battlefield action. Also by that point, surely, some sort of appropriation will be needed for new Ukrainian arms, and of course will face trouble in the House.

So, approximately two months from now, skids may start being greased. But, even then, looking at it from now, we won't know where things will land.

Now, that said? Today, Mr. Skank, Deaf Secretary Pete Hegseth, said that NATO expansion to Ukraine was off the table and it needed to accept it wouldn't get pre-2014 borders. That still doesn't mean a lot as long as Trump is still sending bombs (and more) to Zelensky.

Also, an alleged upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin in Saudi Arabia guarantees no actual action. Donald Trump as peacemaker strikes me as nothing like Teddy Roosevelt. Besides, as of right now, the only guaranteed meeting appears to be representatives of both sides in Munich. And, all of this ignores what the response of Zelensky — or of European NATO members — will be to a proposed peace treaty by diktat.

Since then? It appears that for Trump, a Zelensky shakedown is first, an actual peace deal is second. Shock me. And, Zelensky has said no, at least in its current form.

I generally agree with the likes of John Mearsheimer and other paleoconservative types as well as fellow leftists that we need to get out of Ukraine; if an actual peace treaty is part of that, all the better. But, given that Transactional Don is at the helm, the possibility of this administration actually doing that continues to shrink. So, my header isn't a BlueAnon roasting of Trump; it's a leftist one.