Soon after the November election, but before actually taking office in January of 2025, Trump began to make pronouncements as to how things were going to change, now that America was about to have him as president.  He felt that it was time for America to take control of mineral-rich Greenland. Needless to say, Denmark, whose territory that actually is, was not consulted on this matter.  He also talked about the fact that it was high time for Canada to come into the American Union as its 51st state – shocking Americans and outraging Canadians in the process.  And he declared that the Federal government (and soon Google Maps as well) would no longer designate the waterway below the American southern coast as the Gulf of Mexico.  It would now officially be known as the Gulf of America.  Americans wondered why was that so important ... especially to Trump, when no one else had thought that there was a need for such change.  But if Trump gets his own thoughts on matters, that's all that matters – as Trump sees things.

Indeed, America needed to get used to the idea that with Trump in the White House, presidential aides, including cabinet members, were there not to advise Trump wisely, but only to obey Trump ... in carrying out whatever his most unusual mind was working on at the moment.  Turnover would once again be rapid in the Trump cabinet to those that did not understand the Trump program.

With Trump in the White House, an immediate reversal of America's (and its NATO allies) support of Ukraine in its fight to fend off Russian aggression was announced. Trump even blamed Ukrainian President Zelensky for having "started" the war – ignoring the fact that there was no such war until Russian President Putin took it upon himself to invade Ukraine and bomb its capital city Kiev – without warning or any particular provocation coming from Ukraine.  

Trump claimed that by ending further support of Ukraine, this would force the combatants to come to peace terms ... a strange thing to propose by someone supposedly knowledable about how power works on the world stage.  In fact all this would do would be to support Putin in his Hitler-like urge to secure his regime by bringing surrounding peoples under his control.  That's what the whole thing was about from the very beginning.  

Trump was acting like Chamberlain in 1938 when he let Hitler take over the Sudenland, with the naiive (and costly) belief that by doing so he was bringing peace to the world.  Surrendering Ukraine's ability to defend itself from a massively larger military power bent on muscling its neighbors back under a Russian dependency (that those nations had broken away from at the end of the 1980s) would not only end Ukrainian independence, it would likely then result in a Russian grab of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.  And Finland understood that danger of playing into Putin's hands by recently joining NATO – as did even "neutral" Sweden.  In fact, all this "Trump diplomacy" would do would bring the world back to an ugly Cold War.  

So why was Trump so bent  on pulling a "Chamberlain" on Ukraine?

And when Zelensky came to the White House at the beginning of March (2025), he was simply shouted down by both Vice President Vance and by Trump ... the well-televised meeting proving to be most ugly – and shocking to all.  What was going on here?

Yet Trump somehow believes that he alone is able to bring the Russian-Ukrainian war to an end (making a promise leading up to his election that he could end it within one day of taking office ... which dobviously did not happen).  And thus in August he is meeting Putin (but not Zelensky) in Alaska to go over ways to end the war.  How Trump will do that without taking Ukraine's positon in the matter into account is a huge mytery.  But Tump lives entirely in a world of his own.