WEDNESDAY: Please listen "inside" what the president said!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2025

Also, Friedman quotes Steve Witkoff: In this morning's report, we compared something President Trump recently said to a famous statement by Gretta Conroy in Joyce's acclaimed novella, The Dead.

Trump was speaking to President Macron; the Joyce character was speaking to her husband, Gabriel. Here on this sprawling campus, when we heard the audiotape of the more recent statement, we immediately thought of the other.

The statements in questions are these:

From the pages of this week's news:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

From Joyce's novella, 1914:

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

Here on this campus, when we heard the more recent statement, it sounded a bit like the other. In suggesting that you consider the pair of statements, we're suggesting that you start to listen with your feelings—quite possibly, with the insights the poets alone can provide.

As Gretta Conroy's revelation continues, we learn that her assessment—“I think he died for me,” she said—was based on a firm foundation. President Trump's statement to Macron sounds quite different to us.

What can we learn from the sound of that statement? We 'll pick up there tomorrow, eventually returning to Mary Trump's best-selling book, Too Much and Neve Enough. For today, we'll suggest that you consider Thomas Friedman's new column for the New York Times.

We're not crazy about the headline. But here's how the column begins:

Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is

I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks. I am trying to balance President Trump’s commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine with the utterly personalized, seat-of-the-pants, often farcical way he is going about it—including the energy that everyone involved has to expend feeding his ego and avoiding his wrath, before they even get to the hellish compromises needed to make peace.

For now, the whole thing leaves me deeply uncomfortable.

I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one when where one of the leaders—in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky—felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?

For our money, Friedman is being overly "fair" when he accepts the characterization according to which President Trump is exhibiting a "commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine." 

We know of no reason to believe it's as simple as that—or even that it's anything like that at all.

Beyond that, Friedman describes the hoops our "allies" must jump through as they try to work with the sitting president. Friedman says this raises a troubling question:

How is this ever going to work?

In our view, it also raises the pair of questions we've now been asking for years:

Is something wrong with President Trump? Also, why isn't anyone willing to ask?

The press corps has agreed that those last two questions must never be asked. It seems to us that, if we listen to what the president said to Macron, we may be hearing a part of the answer to the first of those two questions.

In his column, Friedman proceeds to quote Steve Witkoff at substantial length. More specifically, he quotes statements in which Witkoff offers his assessment of Vladimir Putin, with whom he has been negotiating on President Trump's behalf.

Witkoff's lengthy statements sound almost completely delusional. At one point, Friedman says this:

FRIEDMAN: It gets worse. Trump is so deluded as to Putin’s nature that during his summit with European leaders on Monday he was overheard on an open microphone telling President Emmanuel Macron of France about Putin: “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”

Interesting! That said, delusion can be a colloquial term, or it can also go clinical.

In fairness to Witkoff, he may simply be saying what he feels he has to say, given the outlook of the man who has made him our leading ambassador.

When we listened to Trump this week, we also thought we heard the voice of Gretta Conroy. In the next few days, we'll tell you what we thought we heard. 

Mary Trump's book still seems highly instructive to us. Is there any chance—any chance at all—that we Blues can improve our game?

Hitting the links: The Dead became a feature film in 1987, starring Anjelica Huston. Don't cheat yourself out of the chance to see her perform the scene in which, weeping, Gretta Conroy explains her statement:

I think he died for me.

 To watch that scene, click here.

To read that scene as Joyce wrote it, you can simply click this link, then scroll to the end of the story.