Trump Says He’ll End the Ukraine War in 24 Hours. Here’s the Plan.

Donald Trump has been repeatedly claiming that if he is elected president again in 2024 he has a secret plan to end the Russian war on Ukraine “within 24 hours”.

My first reaction was “that’s quick!”. This is the sort of insight my constituents grew accustomed to. Upon deeper reflection, my position evolved into “that’s REALLY quick!” which took my paroxysmal eruptions to new heights.

Why did my perspicacity (I found an old SAT prep book!) lead me to the sageistic, almost gleaming epiphany that solving the largest land war in Europe in eighty years within 24 hours was, to repeat my wildly insightful original phrase, “quick”, or as Isaac Newton might have said, “fast” (I mean, why not?). Well, I’m glad that all of you, meaning probably none of you asked.

First, there are the simple logistics. There are currently about a quarter of a million Russian troops in Ukraine, as well as thousands of tanks, artillery pieces, fuel and supply trucks, etc. It would take weeks to remove all of those soldiers and equipment even if they were trying to do it immediately and without any lingering skirmishes. It can take 24 hours just to get all of the Sixers fans off of the Schuylkill Expressway after they blow a lead in the 4th quarter.

And this assumes that Putin wants his troops to leave and orders them to do so. That seems unlikely, given that after losing over 200,000 Russians and 4,000 tanks, revealing his military to be weak and incompetent, setting his economy back 40 years, and doubling his border with NATO, he is unlikely to survive politically or physically if he just says “nevermind” and heads back home. Trump would have to be some kind of very stable genius to get him to do that. Oh…wait…

The logistical and political issues, as nettlesome as they might be, aren’t the biggest impediment to Putin’s voluntary withdrawal from Ukraine. There is the inconvenient and intractable fact that he is an amoral, psychopath with delusions of grandeur. He’s a wack-a-doo, crazy as a betsy bug, loopy as a soup sandwich. He has a head full of stump water. He’s buck nutty, cattywompus, a cuckoo bird without the bird. He has a kangaroo loose in the top paddock. He is, as Monty Python might say, an ex-sane person.