Nothing says “we care” like flowery letters to dictators.
The White House is a meat grinder of history.
Olena Zelenska, first lady of Ukraine, sends a letter about kidnapped children—20,000 stolen, vanished into the belly of Putin’s war machine—and it lands in the trembling hands of Donald J. Trump, a man constitutionally incapable of understanding anything beyond his own reflection.
He paws at the envelope like a raccoon grabbing a Rolex, muttering that it’s his, though it was never meant for him.
It was addressed to Melania.
This is the sickness of empire at its senile stage: letters of grief and fury delivered to men who treat atrocity as personal fan mail. Zelenska wrote with the urgency of parents whose children are being erased. Trump grinned as if it were an invitation to a golf outing.
He rambled about Alaska, about deals and ice and oil, because in his broken carnival-brain, history is nothing but a ledger of sales. He looked at Putin not as a tyrant, not as the architect of industrial-scale child abductions, but as a fellow property hustler.
Melania’s own letter, delivered to Putin like some schoolgirl’s plea to the headmaster, speaks of children’s laughter, as though the poetry of playgrounds might sway the warlord who bombs maternity wards.
A grotesque theater. Diplomacy as a Hallmark card. And Trump beams, telling the press that she “cried beautifully,” as if grief itself were another product to sell.
And here’s the nightmare: this is not absurdism. This is how power operates now. Letters meant to save abducted children are props in a grotesque vaudeville show. Putin smirks from Moscow. Trump smirks in Washington. And the children—real children, blood and bone—are nowhere, erased into the machinery of war.
History will not flatter this moment. It will not read as comedy. It will read as surrender: the United States reducing human atrocity to gossip-column drama, a First Lady’s anguish tossed around like a party favor. We once had leaders who, for all their crimes, knew when to stand on the throat of tyranny.
Now we have a game show host giggling about who owns the letter.
If Trump respects Putin, it is because he envies him. He envies the unchecked brutality, the machinery of fear, the capacity to steal children without consequence. He looks at Putin and sees not a monster, but a model.
