It could have been – marginally – worse. Donald Trump could have invited the Kinahan gang to the Oval Office for St Patrick’s Day. The US president has a great grá for fugitives from the law. His first official guest at the White House was Binyamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza. He is also itching to meet Vladimir Putin, the subject of a global arrest warrant for war crimes in Ukraine, including the abduction of thousands of children.
Trump basks in the glint of bad guys. He even fancies he is the leader of the gang. The war in Ukraine “would never have started if I were president”, he has bragged. “I’ll get it settled in 24 hours.” But wishful thinking cannot turn a squashy Halloween pumpkin face into steel. Trump has his own iniquitous record to big him up in a room of fugitives, though a bit of fraud and sexual assault are mere venial pickings next to his buddies’ mass atrocities. He just might put a horse in the Senate but they’ll put the horse’s head in your bed.
Putin and Netanyahu are happy to play along and let Trump think he’s the leader of the gang. In fact, he’s their useful idiot facilitator. That was clear as soon as the Israeli leader signed a ceasefire agreement with Hamas that allowed the incoming president in Washington to claim it as his victory. The ink was still wet when Netanyahu was promising to resume slaughtering Gazans and Trump was predicting the ceasefire wouldn’t last. Then – surprise, surprise – Netanyahu reneged on phase two of the agreement and, with the blessing of the White House on St Patrick’s Day, sent planes to bomb the territory in the dead of night, killing and injuring more than 1,000 civilians. Of the 400 dead, 183 were children.
To Trump, Gaza is nobody’s home. It’s “a demolition site”. Its people are a hindrance to his plundering plans. He wants them all gone – though not to his country – so that he can construct Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Med. Little wonder he rejected an Arab leaders’ plan to rebuild Gaza while keeping its people in situ. As long as there’s a buck to be made, he’ll keep shipping American killing machinery to Netanyahu and insist on his share of the spoils from the bloodshed.
We would not invite Putin or Netanyahu to Ireland. So why invite their idiot facilitator?
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Her ‘no’ was clear. She did not want to go home with him. Still he went on. And on
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In Moscow, Putin convinces Trump he is saying yes to peace when he is actually saying “not on your life, pal”. Putin’s insistence that no foreign military enter Ukraine exceeds Trump’s remit, purposely. His demands that the US stop supplying Ukraine with arms and intelligence are so freshly familiar you wonder who gave Trump the idea when he did exactly that on March 5th. On March 6th, Russia launched a massive ballistic missile and drone attack on Ukraine. “I actually think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” Trump pronounced. That’s hardly the sentiment of someone who means it when he decries “horrible, horrible war” and says it must end.
[ The Irish Times view on the partial ceasefire in Ukraine: a deal in name onlyOpens in new window ]
This week, Trump ordered the cessation of US tracking of Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped into Russia, a charge Putin faces in the International Criminal Court. The order effectively halts the collection of evidence. When he said before Tuesday’s phone call with Putin that they would be talking about “dividing up the assets”, he did not clarify if he meant that Putin could have Donetsk while he’d take the lithium, copper, titanium and nuclear plants.
The world is in the chokehold of an axis of evil. More than one million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed since Putin ordered the invasion. Nearly 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have perished in Gaza.
The rule of law holds no fear for the godfathers of these killing fields. In Russia, the courts do the Kremlin’s bidding. In Israel, the government is legislating to increase political control over the appointment of judges and wants politicians to override Supreme Court judgments. In America, Trump accuses judges of being “activist”, “rogue” and plain “bad”, mooting that a judge who ruled against his deportation of Venezuelans last weekend should be impeached. Had he not become president, it is possible that Trump could be heading to jail for inciting the Capitol riot. The charges were dropped after his election. On his first day back in the Oval Office, he signed orders releasing the convicted rioters from prison en masse.
Wanted man Putin sends assassins around the world to poison his rivals. Wanted man Netanyahu puts the lives of Israeli hostages in peril to salvage his buckling career as he stands trial for corruption and bribery. Unwanted man – in this country, at least – Trump watches and learns how to muzzle judges and journalists, the bulwarks of democratic accountability. His White House has barred Reuters, Associated Press and HuffPost from briefings while Trumpite podcasters are invited to ask suck-up pseudo-questions.
He has accused CNN and MSNBC of being “political arms of the Democrat [sic] Party” while lackey publisher Jeff Bezos forbids columnists to express opinions contrary to his in The Washington Post and fellow lackey Mark Zuckerberg abandons fact-checking by Meta.
It’s not quite Russia, where the killing of journalists has soared since the 2006 murder of award-winning investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, assassinated in an elevator at her apartment building, having previously survived poisoning while on a flight from Moscow. Nor is it quite Israel. Up to two days ago, at least 170 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon since the start of Netanyahu’s onslaught in October 2023.
Know my friends, know me. Thus goes the truism. Under no circumstances would Ireland invite Putin or Netanyahu to visit this country. If they did sneak in, they would be sent for trial in The Hague. Yet an official invitation has been extended to their facilitator-in-chief. It may not be pragmatic to officially disinvite him but he might hesitate to accept if a great mass of the Irish public signed a petition saying: “We don’t want you in our country.”
It is inevitable that thieves fall out in the end but this world may not have the luxury of waiting for that to happen.
