A couple of fascinating, mind-blowing behind-the-scenes accounts from the Trump years I hadn’t heard of before now.

Was This President Trump’s Ballsiest Play Ever?
As President, Donald Trump’s ballsiest moment might have come as he was negotiating an end to our two-decade presence in Afghanistan. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Tex.) told the story to Sage Steele on a recent video podcast.

“I want to leave Afghanistan,” Trump is supposed to have said at a high-level meeting with the Taliban. “But it’s going to be a conditions-based withdrawal.” Hunt recalled Trump saying, “If you harm a hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you.”

After the translator did his bit — and Hunt indicated that the translator was shocked by Trump’s statement and hesitated before passing it along — Trump pulled a picture of the Taliban leader’s home out of his pocket, handed it to him, and then left.

Statement. Made.

“If this is not the most gangster thing I’ve ever heard,” one X user posted, “I don’t know what is.”

Indeed it is. Ah, but does it get even better from there, you ask? Why, yes. Yes, it certainly does.

But was that really President Trump’s ballsiest moment? Maybe. 

Or maybe it comes in second place to this classic power play against Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

Trump once told the story to friend and golf pro John Daly about the time he put The Fear of God into Putin, too. 

“They’re all saying, ‘Oh, he’s a nuclear power. It’s like they’re afraid of him,’” Trump told Daly, referring to Putin, in the call posted on Instagram Friday.

“You know, he was a friend of mine,” Trump preened. “I got along great with him.”

But Trump insisted on the call that he also played tough with his buddy. If Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump claimed he warned him: “We’re gonna hit Moscow.” And “he sort of believed me, like 5%, 10%,” Trump added. “That’s all you need. He never did it during my time, John, you know…He didn’t do this during the last four years because he knew he couldn’t,” Trump added.

This is where I’d remind you that Putin seized Crimea and much of the Donbas in 2014 while Barack Obama was our commander-in-chief and launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 on Presidentish Joe Biden’s watch. Things were certainly tense between Kyiv and Moscow while Trump was in the Oval Office, but Putin’s comparative timidity from 2017 through 2020 certainly lends credence to Trump’s story.

Trump understands that the real trick to being powerful on the world stage is to appear just crazy enough to use that power — and then you almost never have to.

Well, of course he does. Why do you think the shitlibs hate the guy so frenetically, so desperately, that the mere thought of him somehow becoming President again drives them into agonies of inchoate rage, despair, and daylight barking madness? OMB constitutes the only serious, credible threat to the Long March of the authoritarian/totalitarian/collectivist agenda in many a moon.

As for Trump’s folksy, politically-canny evaluation of Putin as “a friend of mine,” I am reminded of something I wrote about here at the time, more than once. In the early innings of his term as POTUS, Trump publicly suggested that he and Putin should work together to end the scourge of Moslem terrorism once and for all—a bold, unprecedented overture that Putin seemed to find intriguing, judging by his initial guarded but nonetheless encouraging response. Naturally and to the surprise of exactly no one, taxonomical sub-genus Leftardus Diabolus© got busy strangling the notional alliance in the crib via their “Russian collusion” stratagem. And that, friends, was the end of that.

Verily, the perfidious scumsacks have much to answer for. Although the ignominious episode is all but forgotten by now, the numbskull Left’s sabotage of President Trump’s worthy proposal—a noteworthy example of shrewd, outside-the-box creative thinking which could have been of incalculable benefit not to just the US and Russia alone, but to Western Civ entire, in all kinds of unexpected ways—must surely be in that number.

Update! Trump’s side-splitting July 4th message to his fellow Americans, courtesy of Alex Jones.

Heh. Good rip, Mr President, sir.

Big brass update! Fran chimes in with another confirmatory example of Trump’s church-bell-sized testicular endowment.

But while the above is indeed impressive, something a bit more recent has impressed me even more.

Donald Trump has known for several years that his political adversaries don’t just disagree with him; they want him dead or imprisoned for life. That’s been ever more openly displayed as time has passed. Nevertheless, he campaigned to return to the office that was stolen from him, intensifying his enemies’ animus. He’s also openly attacked them for what they’ve done, starting with their theft of the 2020 election and going straight on from there, such that they’ve had to fear for their own freedom should he defeat them. He’s never attempted to moderate his attacks on them; therefore they must know that in a regime of objective justice restored, they will truly be at hazard.

Of course, much of that could be dismissed as bluster; after all, politicians are known for that sort of behavior. But Trump has never backed down. When the opposition was foolish enough to accept his challenge to a debate, and demanded a slew of conditions all of which were slanted in their favor, Trump, sure of the solidity of the ground on which he stood, simply agreed to all of it. Political commentators far and wide were certain he’d made a terrible blunder. They predicted a disaster that would cripple Trump irrevocably.

But Trump was right and they were wrong. His June 27th “debate” with Joe Biden was a spectacular triumph. It has made him almost impossible to beat come November. Somehow, he knew that it would be that way, despite the predictions of all the major-media figures who foresaw a terrible setback for him.

As COL Joseph Ives famously said of the great Robert E Lee and audacity, “Fearless” might be Trump’s name. The line between fearlessness and hubris is as fine and thin as hair on a frog’s back, admittedly, so we won’t know for sure which of those descriptors apply to OMB until the particulars of his ongoing persecution have all played out to their respective conclusions. Personally, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and make the call for “fearless,” but could be that’s just the child-like optimist in me talking.

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