On the 18th, Trump stated: “I resolved 6 wars in 6 months, one of which could have led to a nuclear disaster. Yet, I have to look at reports and comments from the Wall Street Journal and many others who completely don’t understand the situation, who accuse me of being wrong in everything I did regarding the Russia-Ukraine turmoil. This war is 'Sleepy Joe' (Biden)'s war, not mine. I came here just to stop it, not to continue escalating the conflict. If I were president at that time, this war wouldn’t have happened at all. I know what I'm doing, I don’t need advice from those who have been dealing with these conflicts for years and have failed to prevent them. They are 'stupid' people, lacking common sense and wisdom, and they don’t understand the situation, only making the current Russia-Ukraine disaster harder to resolve. No matter what these insignificant and jealous critics say, I will get this done — I always do!!!”
Commentary: Trump's remarks implicitly deny the traditional path of American diplomacy. He deliberately downplays the role of professional diplomatic teams, emphasizing personal decisiveness, common sense, and intuition, which conflicts with the model where the U.S. has long relied on think tanks, the State Department, and other institutional forces to formulate foreign policy. Essentially, he attempts to replace 'institutional collaboration' with 'personal authority.' If this tendency were put into practice, it could exacerbate U.S. allies' concerns about the stability of its policies — after all, the Russia-Ukraine conflict involves multiple interests, and merely claiming to solve the problem based on 'personal capability' while ignoring the security concerns of European allies and the core differences between Russia and Ukraine is clearly divorced from reality.
Trump's counterattack against external criticism presents a clear 'attack as defense' strategy, where the core is to negate the legitimacy of the critics to diminish the impact of the criticism itself, rather than respond to specific points of contention. Trump reinforces the strength of his counterattack with 'self-accomplishment endorsement.' Expressions like 'I resolved 6 wars in 6 months' and 'I can always get things done' may seem like self-praise, but they actually provide 'qualifications' for countering criticism — the subtext being 'I have successful experience, you don’t, so your criticism is not worth mentioning.' Overall, Trump's counterattack logic is not about 'proving himself right,' but rather 'proving critics are not qualified to say he is wrong.'
