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Donald Trump's post-truth alternative facts about Ukraine

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Some notes about Donald Trump's 2025-02-19 weird statements about Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

― George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Note: this post has been written before the 2025-02-28 Trump-Zelensky meeting.

Table of content

The claims

The other day (2025-02-19), US president (or is it king? KOTUS?) Donald Trump claimed in half words that Ukraine started the war of Russia against Ukraine (or at least was responsible for it):

I have the power to end this war and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, 'oh, well we weren't invited'. Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.

— Donald Trump

He also claimed that president Zelenskyy was at 4% approval rating and was ipso facto a dictator on the grounds that the presidential elections have been postponed (during wartime):

Well we have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine well we have martial law, essentially, martial law in Ukraine where the leader in Ukraine I mean I hate to say it be he's down at 4% approval rating

— Donald Trump

On Twitter[1], he also stated that Zelenskyy was quite happy that the war was still ongoing as it was allowing him to receive money from other countries:

Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we went him is “MISSING”. He refuses to face Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Pollsn and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle“. A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. […] Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going.

— Donald Trump

The first two statements are blatantly false and not backed by anything. As for the third statement, claiming without any form of proof that Zelenskyy would want the war to continue in order to keep receiving money from foreign countries is obscene and an insult to all the people who have suffered, died and been tortured and are still dying, suffering and being tortured during this war.

It is very sad and disheartening to hear such statements from the head of the United States. By repeating Putin's narrative as its own, president Trump gives credit to Russia's alternative reality and serves the purpose of the Kremlin very well. By repeating the Kremlin's lies, the US president does not make the United States of America great again. It is sad[2] to see the USA fall that low.

Analysis

Responsability of Ukraine in the war

I have the power to end this war and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, 'oh, well we weren't invited'. Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.

— Donald Trump

President Trump repeats the lies of Putin, claiming that Ukraine (or Zelenskyy?) would be responsible for the war. This is terribly worrying and morally wrong for several reasons:

Zelenskyy's legitimacy

Well we have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine well we have martial law, essentially, martial law in Ukraine where the leader in Ukraine I mean I hate to say it be he's down at 4% approval rating.

— Donald Trump

This appears to be completely false. Zelenzsky appears to be around 57%-63% of approval and estimated at 10-20% of votes in case of presidential elections. This would apparently be better than the approval rates of the (freshly elected) president Donald Trump (estimated between 44% and 47% depending on the source). President Trump is making extravagant claims which cannot be corroborated by any source.

Zelensky admits that half of the money we went him is “MISSING”. He refuses to face Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls ans the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle“. A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. […] Zelensky probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going.

— Donald Trump

Begging for elections during wartime is a nice way to weaken Ukraine's leadership. This would make these elections very vulnerable to interferences by foreign countries. Trump is actually singing Putin's song here. Calling Zelenskyy a dictator because of this is a gratuitous insult. Apparently, Ukrainians are not much bothered by this delay anyway and 63% would want to delay the elections after the end of the war.

In the context of the Russian/Ukraine conflict, choosing to call Zelenskyy a dictator is quite ironic. Why dare calling Zelenskyy a dictator and not Putin? Yes, Putin has been elected in 2024 (at 88.48%) but we all know the state of free speech in Russia and president Trump should know it as well.

Trump is saying blatant lies. Anybody who cares enough to spend a few minutes checking these claims knows he is lying. But he does not care because he is living in a post-truth world where alternative facts can be made out of thin air.

Note: on “gravy train”

English is not my first language so I had lo look up the meaning for “gravy train”. Apparently, it means:

a situation where people seem to be making a lot of money without much effort

Really? Making money without much effort? Even if we were to assume that Donald Trump's claims are accurate, this expressions is terribly disrespectful for the people enduring the war.

Alternative facts

Alternative Facts and Trump

Donald Trump's malleable conception of truth and reality is of course not a new thing. At the beginning of his first mandate already, he and his teams were already providing “alternative facts“.

Events are subject to interpretation, depending on the side and sensibility of the analyst. Often, we don't know the truth and there is disagreement about what is fact and what is not. But facts are facts (whether we know them or not and whether we like them or not): there are no alternative facts. The idea of “alternative facts” is dangerous as it it appears to imply that even facts are not an objective reality but could freely change depending on our political opinions, nation and allegiance. Instead of seeking the truth based on proofs and evidences, we could just make arbitrary claims aligned with our ideology without any proof to back them up and rewrite past events as we please. It becomes impossible for people of different ideology to use facts as a shared ground for rational discourse.

Alternative facts and social media

Donald Trump's and Elon Musks's attitude towards social media is related to this malleable notion of truth and reality.

Truth Social's very name is rooted in this idea of truth as an emanation of his own ideology[3]. The other social networks at the time of its creation were not pleasing Donald Trump. They were therefore not the truth so he created something which would be the (his) truth. This name actually means that the goal is to forge one's own version of the truth and has an autocratic aftertaste. This name is very reminiscient of Nineteen Eighty-Four's Ministry of Truth (Minitru).

Trump and Musk appears to appreciate the echo chamber given by their social media (especially since Musk's takeover of Twitter). For example, Le Monde has an article claiming that Musk's understanding of Europe is b(i)ased on a few far right Twitter accounts.

Elon Musk and social media

Elon Musk's despises standard news media (calling them “legacy news” in Twitter posts), apparently finding social media much more reliable. Elon Musk finds (or tries to make us believe) that consuming Twitter's 280 characters (or 4,000 characters) tweets is unequivocally a better way to to be informed than reading articles arguably written by people who spent more than one minute writing them.

I almost never read legacy news anymore.

What’s the point of reading 1000 words about something that was already posted on 𝕏 several days ago?

— Elon Musk

This statement is very emblematic of Musk's conception of what news, communication and public discourse should be. Why care about reading 1,000 words of information produced after some time of analysis and fact-checking when we can skim through some 280-character tweets produced in the instant? Legacy news is so oldthink.

With his takeover of Twitter, Elon Musks shapes the social network in order to emphasize emotional content over verifiable one, partisan content over neutral one[4]:

in Musk’s short tenure as owner of the platform, a new set of news elites has emerged. These elites post frequently, many sharing unvetted content and emotionally charged media. While sharing no single political ideology, many embrace a similar culture of rapid production of unlinked or ambiguously sourced content, embracing a “firehose of media” ethos that places the onus of verification on the end-user. This occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the “credibility signals” that served to ground users in the past — checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter/X-based labeling of deceptive content. Even fundamental affordances of the web — such as simple sourcing through links — have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users’ attention.

— Mike Caulfield, Mert Can Bayar and Ashlyn B. Aske, The ‘new elites’ of X: Identifying the most influential accounts engaged in Hamas/Israel discourse

Another recent Tweet from Elon Musk:

Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.

Working to fix this …

It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!

If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election.

In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine, which is why he has refused to hold an election. I challenge Zelensky to hold an election and refute this. He will not.

President Trump is right to ignore him and solve for peace independent of the disgusting, massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.

— Elon Musk

The source Elon Musk is citing alonsgide his tweet is a tweek from @amuse[5], self-described as “𝕏 First Conservative Headlines & Articles”. This Twitter account claims (without caring to provide a source):

US Intelligence estimates public support for Zelensky and his policies at around 4% among Ukrainians [...]

— @amuse

@amuse did not provide any source to back up his claim and I could not find any source to back this claim either. Either @amuse has some insider source inside the US Intelligence or he is making that up.

So it would appear that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are using some random far-right Twitter account as reliable source of information. The information is probably completely made-up. Indeed what’s the point of reading 1000 words about something that was already posted on Twitter several days ago?

We could instead assume that they have genuinely US Intelligence information providing infromation that we don't have but it does not really look that way. None of them apparenly ever claimed that this 4% popularity information is actually coming from US Intelligence. They simply imply it by letting some unofficial allies say it instead.

Alternative Facts and Russia

This willingness of bending facts and truth is not specific to Trump's administration and Trump's supporters. The same techniques have been used for many years by the Russian propagandists which make a lot of completely nonsensical, extravagant and often inconsistent statements such as:

The same technique is used to influence foreign opinion through troll factories.

Social media and Russia

Russia is known to orchestrate manipulations of opinion, for example in order to influence elections in many European countries and the US for example through troll factories.

Both Trump and Elson Musk have a strong fondness on social networks and appear to despise more traditional sources of information. That might make them very vulnerable to manipulation by foreign agents posing as far-right influencers.

Alternative Facts and Nineteen Eighty-Four

This malleable approach to truth and reality was described in Georges Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this book, the propaganda deconstructs thinking (doublethink) and the language itself (Newspeak) by systemic usage of incoherent wordings, mottos and statements. Orwell calls doublethink the deconstruction of thinking:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

– George Orwell (1949), Nineteen Eighty-Four

This book was largely inspired by the USSR and Stalinism. It is interesting to note that Stalin has been rehabilitated in Russia in the recent years. The ideas developped in the book are very reminiscent to the current state of Russia:

Where we are going

There is a ongoing war against objective rational thinking. This is of course not new: Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 and was largely based on the USSR. But seeing the USA stroll this path alongside Russia is very unpleasant.

We should wonder if this will spread to other countries. Are there structural reasons for this? Will the massification of large-scale communication (and social networks? with the help of AI-generated content?) lead to an inevitable demise of rational thinking and the rise of populist leaders in other countries? What can we do about it?

References

In English:

In Ukrainian:

In Russian:

In French:

  1. I have absolutely no love for pre-Musk Twitter but I won't call it with its new name, which is an expressions of Musk's pride and arrogance. ↩︎

  2. That is not an anti-US statement. I appreciate the US culture and people. A lot of US people I have met have always been very nice and friendly. The US contributions to science, computer science, art and popular culture are huge. There are many people in the US who are afraid and ashamed of what is going on there. However, Donald Trump's foreign policy do not make the US shine, sadly.

    The same of course could be said of other countries which have had their own share of shameful moments in history. France has its own share of shady foreign affairs stuff. In the recent years, the whole Gaddafi story comes to mind. ↩︎

  3. This name is also quite similary to Pravda (Правда) (meaning “truth”), the USSR newspaper whose name has the same Orwellian vibe. ↩︎

  4. I would be tempted to claim that a social media designed for large-scale publishing of 280-character messages is inherently optimized for emotional charged content and unverified claims. ↩︎

  5. You should have a quick look at @muse's posts to better appreciate the quality of the non-legacy news sought after by Elon Musk. ↩︎

  6. Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, those who will never forgive the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making a choice to reunite with Russia.

    […]

    Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine.

    — Vladimir Putin, 2022-02-24

    We would like to see a Ukraine that is friendly, demilitarised, and immune to the danger of the creation of yet another Nazi state, a Ukraine that will not ban the Russian language, Russian culture, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Regrettably, all of this has been done and is reflected in law.

    […]

    We still want all issues to be settled diplomatically. But this time we have explained very clearly the necessity of the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine.

    — Sergey Lavrov, 2022-03-10

    Actually, it would appear that Ukraine has a law “On the Condemnation of the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Regimes, and Prohibition of Propaganda of their Symbols”:

    Propaganda of communist and national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes and their symbols shall be deemed outrage upon memory of millions of victims of the communist totalitarian regime, national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regime and is prohibited by the law.

    ↩︎

  7. Question to Maria Zakharova, 2023-05-17:

    With Satanism on the rampage in the West, they would like to learn more about our culture and traditions and connect with it. Is there any way to make it easier for these people to get Russian visas or residence permits? Can the Russian Foreign Ministry reward, by its support, those foreign citizens, who courageously, with St George’s ribbons on, join the effort to tend monuments to fallen Red Army soldiers?

    Question to Maria Zakharova, 2024-08-21:

    [...] foreign citizens and their families who apply for relocation to Russia in an effort to flee the satanic dictatorships that have taken root in a number of countries.

    ↩︎