There is only one way to interpret the meaning of the carefully scripted, rehearsed, memorized , sloganized, and repeated words which President Donald Trump announced in his Monday meeting with Mark Rutte, the Dutch ex-prime minister and now Secretary-General of NATO. They mean the opposite of what he thinks he is saying; and he cannot comprehend either the difference, or that they mean nothing at all. Between meaning that is false in fact and meaning that is non-credible to a friend or foe, Trump’s brain cannot discriminate; does not comprehend.

By Russian as well as Anglo-American neurological and psychiatric standards, this man is a certifiable maniac.

The strategic problem this poses for Russia’s military and political decision-makers, according to a source in a position to know, is that Trump’s mental disability is not that he is lying – he doesn’t aim to deceive. Rather, he is clinically incapable of understanding the logic, the evidence, the weight of options, and the sequence and consequence of actions. He cannot think; ergo, he cannot negotiate in good or even bad faith. He is, according to this Russian neurological diagnosis, a mentally incapacitated brain with only one reflex – the use of force to compel capitulation or effect destruction.

Trump said it himself during his 34-minute press briefing yesterday (July 14) with NATO Secretary-General, ex-Dutch premier Mark Rutte. “[President Vladimir Putin] fooled a lot of people. He fooled Bush. He fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me. But what I do say is that at a certain point, you know, ultimately talk doesn’t talk. It’s got to be action.”

By action, Trump told Rutte, “we make the best and we’re going to be sending the best to NATO, and in some cases, to maybe, at Mark’s suggestion, if we go to Germany where they’re going to send early on missiles and they’ll be replaced and NATO is going to take care of it…we’re going to make top of the line weapons and they’ll be sent to NATO. NATO may choose to have certain of them sent to other countries where we can get a little additional speed where the country will release something and it’ll be mostly in the form of a replacement…we have the best equipment in the world. We make equipment like no other. You know, our submarines, nuclear submarines are so powerful, they’re the most powerful weapon ever built. And we have the best in the world by — they’re [Russia] 20 years behind 25 years behind us. We have the greatest equipment anywhere in the world. I just hope we don’t have to use it.”

Rutte acknowledged that the new US arms to be supplied to the Ukraine will include both Patriot missile batteries for air defence, as well as long-range missiles. “You,” Rutte to Trump, “are the most powerful nation on Earth, the most powerful military on Earth. But given that, the US has decided to indeed massively supply Ukraine with what is necessary through NATO. Europeans are 100 percent paying for that. And what we have been doing over the last couple of days is talking with countries…it will mean that Ukraine can get its hands on really massive numbers of military equipment both for air defence but also missiles, ammunition, etc., etc…this afternoon, Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister is visiting Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense and we’ll discuss also I think on this whole Patriot thing. Norway is involved. So that’s on the Patriots. But this whole deal is also about missiles or ammunition. So it’s broader than Patriots…I can tell you that at this moment, Germany massively but also Finland and Denmark and Sweden and Norway, we have Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, they all want to be part of this and this is only the first wave. There will be more. So what we will do is work through the NATO systems to make sure that we know what Ukrainians need so that we can make packages.”

Trump added that President Putin is “pleasant” to talk to but not “serious”. After Putin delivered last week (July 10), through Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a revised set of end-of-war proposals which Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a “new idea, new concept”, Trump doesn’t dismiss them so much as indicate that he does not know what the July 10 proposals are, or how they differ from those tabled by Russia in Istanbul of June 2 .

In Trump’s recall, as he reports himself, there have only been his telephone calls with Putin. He does not remember anything else.

“I [Trump] speak to him a lot about getting this thing done and I always hang up and say, well, that was a nice phone call, and then missiles launched into Kyiv or some other city. And I said, it’s strange. And after that happens three or four times, you say, the talk doesn’t mean anything. My conversations with him are always very pleasant. I say, isn’t that a very lovely conversation, and then the missiles go off that night. I go home, I tell the First Lady, you know, I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation. She said, oh, really, another city was just hit. So it’s like, look, he’s — I don’t want to say he’s an assassin, but he’s a tough guy.”

Trump is repeating himself. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” he said at a cabinet meeting on July 9. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless” – Min 5:26.

Rutte spoke for Trump when he dismissed the 33-point Russian negotiating memorandum of June 2 because the messenger, head of delegation in Istanbul Vladimir Medinsky, was “this historian, explaining history of Russia since 1250…So if I was Vladimir Putin today and hear you speaking about what you were planning to do in 50 days and this announcement, I would reconsider whether I should not take negotiations about Ukraine more seriously than I was doing at the moment, if I was Vladimir Putin. But when I’m Ukraine, I think this is really great news for them.”

At NATO prompting, the Trump Administration has now dismissed the Russian terms of June 2 and the new July 10 Lavrov proposals as perfunctorily as the Biden Administration dismissed the proposed treaties for the US and NATO, which Lavrov’s ministry submitted on December 17, 2021.

Those were the final terms before Russian strategy was compelled to pre-emptive and preventive war, but on Putin’s orders, that was a “special military operation” short of war.

Moscow sources now say that on the evidence of Trump’s latest statements, he will not negotiate on any terms Russia has already submitted or will submit. He can only understand terms of capitulation he dictates himself. But even those ceasefire and peacemaking agreements Trump claims the credit for negotiating himself are garbled in his recitation of them. In addition to the Pakistan-India, Israel-Iran, Congo-Rwanda and Serbia-Kosovo agreements he has mentioned before, he told Rutte he is now claiming credit for two new ones he hasn’t mentioned earlier – for which there is no evidence at all.

“We solved another one, one that we just seemed to have Armenia and Azerbaijan. It looks like that’s going to come to a conclusion, successful conclusion. We worked on Egypt with our [their] next-door neighbour who is a good neighbour [Ethiopia]. They’re friends of mine, but they happened to build a dam which closed up water going into a thing [sic] called the Nile. I think if I’m Egypt, I want to have water in the Nile and we’re working on that one. It’s a problem, but it’s going to get solved. They [Ethiopia] built one of the biggest dams in the world, a little bit outside of Egypt. You know about that. You’ve been hearing about that one and that turned out to be a big problem. I don’t know. I think the United States funded the dam. I don’t know why they didn’t solve the problem before they built the dam, but it’s nice when the Nile River has water. It’s a very important source of income in life. It’s the life of Egypt and to take that away is pretty incredible, but we think we’re going to have that solved very quickly. So we do good.”

Trump’s references are to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) which has been built between 2011 and 2023, on Ethiopia’s Blue Nile River, east of the Sudanese border, and 2,500 kilometres upstream from Egypt. China was involved in the financing; the US was not. Ethiopia’s conflict with Egypt over the dam can be followed here.

Trump’s recall of the GERD project was from a meeting he had a month ago, on June 18, with Ethiopia’s newly appointed ambassador to the US, Binalf Andualem. The Ethiopian press agency reported the meeting briefly. Trump ignored it in his tweet record, and there is no reference to the meeting in the official White House calendar for the day. Click for a brief review.

Left, President Trump in the Oval Office on June 18 with Ethiopian Ambassador Binalf Andualem.

Russian sources also believe that Trump’s incapacity is well understood by his own officials – the subordinates he has appointed, and the staffs under them – to be as useful to them for continuing their war against Russia as it was for their predecessors to have under the President Joseph Biden who was incapacitated by Lewy Body dementia associated with his late-stage Parkinson’s Disease.

The mental incapacity of a US president is not exactly a new problem for the Kremlin. It was last recognized in Ronald Reagan during his first term — as early as April 1981, after Reagan had survived a gunshot wound and two hours of surgery under general anaesthesia. But at that time, the Soviet Politburo was already in the Afghanistan War and struggling with the incapacities of Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Compared to the Polish mania of Zbigniew Brzezinski who had triggered the war in Kabul in 1979, the Reagan succession was a small relief for the Kremlin.

In strategizing for Russia’s defence, President Putin has always opted against deterrent, preventive or pre-emptive military measures, insisting on more time, and allowing the oligarch constituencies surrounding him to persuade against recognizing the US war as a permanent threat to Russia.

Putin has just admitted this in a television interview on July 14. “I thought that the contradictions with the West were primarily ideological,” he said. “It seemed logical at the time – Cold War inertia, different views of the world, values, the organization of society. But even when the ideology disappeared, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the same, almost routine deviation from Russia’s interests continued. And it was not because of ideas, but because of the pursuit of advantages – geopolitical, economic, strategic. The world respects only those who can protect themselves. Until we show that we are an independent and sovereign power that stands behind our interests, there will be no room for anyone to treat us as equals.” Source: https://t.me/s/zarubinreporter — translated here.

President Putin in interview with Pavel Zarubin, July 14. Source: https://twitter.com/onlydjole/status/1944402835988201736

This is Putin’s acknowledgment, without his using the Soviet terminology, that it’s not his fault that reality turns out to be Marxist – the famous quip of Che Guevara.

The General Staff reaction to Trump’s new 50-day deadline for Russia to capitulate is to anticipate an escalation in US force. According to a source in a position to know, “50 days means special ops, attacks [inside Russia] within the next few weeks. That’s Trump’s bluff. Any escalation from Trump will get Oreshniki. Otherwise we will keep grinding away, hit new targets. Americans and Europeans, too. But both sides would like the full-fledged war to be delayed and try to win now through deep destructive strikes. On our side, there is a huge sense of relief that the war continues. Everyone wants peace but no one wants not to win.”

Whether or not Trump has agreed with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to supply long-range offensive missiles for the Germans to operate in the Ukraine against Russian hinterland targets is not yet clear. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was at the Pentagon while Rutte was with Trump at the White House, but the press release from the Pentagon omits detail. “Beside bilateral topics,” Pistorius told Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, “we will have the opportunity today to discuss some of the key security challenges we face together, strengthening NATO and enhancing our collective defence capabilities, which is really a relevant challenge, maintaining our steadfast support for Ukraine in its courageous fight for freedom and sovereignty, and addressing regional security dynamics in key regions like the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.”

In advance of his arrival in Washington, Pistorius telegraphed his Ukrainian arms plan. “‘We only have six [Patriot systems] left in Germany,’ Pistorius said, adding that two others had been lent to Poland and at least one was always unavailable due to maintenance or training. ‘That’s really too few, especially considering the Nato capability goals we have to meet. We definitely can’t give any more…Pistorius said he would discuss a proposal he made to Hegseth last month to let Germany buy two Patriot systems from the US for Kyiv…Pistorius said Germany would not deliver its long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine despite a wave of recent Russia air attacks and a renewed request from Kyiv.”