Vitamin R: Vexler Is Right, We Are Adrift—But He’s Wrong to Imply Trump Cares About American Power
- john raymond
- Jul 20
- 4 min read
Vlad Vexler’s latest video and Substack essay (July 20, 2025) cuts with the clarity of someone recently reborn—from illness, yes, but also from illusion...
Vexler sees, as many still refuse to see, that our democratic vessel is taking on water. The illusion of NATO solidity is just that—illusion—and European leaders, desperate for stability, are clinging to vague gestures and media appearances by Donald Trump that mask a deeper truth: NATO, and the democratic unity it once symbolized, is crumbling under the weight of internal sabotage and external fears.
Europe’s Paradox: Damned If You Arm, Damned If You Don’t
Vexler gets this exactly right. Europe faces a lethal contradiction. It must rearm to deter Putin—but doing so, in the context of a weakened social fabric and already-shaky trust in institutions, risks handing political power to the very populist and authoritarian forces that admire Putin’s methods. Across the continent, Trumpian and Putinistic movements are not dormant. They are already governing. Hungary is already lost to Orbánism. Italy flirts openly with Putin’s ideological cousins. France and Germany are teetering.
In this context, pouring billions into tanks and missiles while gutting healthcare, education, and climate adaptation doesn’t appear prudent—it creates the populist backlash it was supposed to prevent. Europe is not just defending itself from Russia—it is defending itself from its compromised self. And that, as Vexler says, is the core dilemma.
The Media’s Complicity in Authoritarian Drift
Vexler rightly skewers the Western media for its softness, its performative neutrality, and its inability to confront authoritarian figures as threats rather than guests. The press continues to normalize anti-democratic actors by framing them within conventional politics, rather than naming what they are: threats to the very system that allows free press to exist.
This failure is not new. It has been metastasizing since at least 2015. But now, as Trump ascends toward dictatorship in the United States and threatens to fracture Europe’s spine by holding NATO hostage to his whims, the stakes are existential. Yet the coverage is still focused on optics, not outcomes.
The Path Forward Isn’t NATO Alone
Where Vexler soars is in proposing not the abandonment of NATO, but the construction of something alongside it. A parallel project. A second vessel. One grounded in realism, democratic legitimacy, and independence from the American political cycle. NATO has become unreliable not because Europe failed, but because the United States did. If Trump is the face of American power, then liberal Europe must prepare to survive without American reliability.
This doesn’t mean severing ties. It means contingency planning for survival. Vexler gestures toward something like a New United Nations—one that includes only true democracies, and whose legitimacy does not rest on Cold War inertia or American exceptionalism.
Where Vexler Misses the Mark: Trump’s Intentions
And yet, for all his insight, Vexler misses the mark in one crucial place: Trump’s relationship to American power.
Vexler argues that Trump fails to realize that weakening Europe will not make the United States stronger. That he misunderstands the strategic importance of NATO and global alliances. That he is, in essence, undermining American prestige without knowing it.
But this is far too generous.
Trump does not care about American power. He is not misinformed about global strategy—he is simply uninterested in it. His only concern is his own power—his ability to dominate, to extract loyalty, to humiliate allies and enemies alike. If weakening Europe makes Trump feel stronger, more central, more praised—then he sees it as a win. Even if it burns American institutions to the ground in the process.
He wants a world not where America leads, but where Trump dictates. And that distinction matters. Trump’s hostility to NATO is not the result of geopolitical confusion—it is a strategy of asymmetric domination. A world of feeble allies and weakened democracies allows him to play kingmaker, punisher, broker, and messiah—roles that cannot exist in a world of strong, sovereign peers.
Trump’s Logic Is Not Strategic—It’s Personalist
Vexler correctly diagnoses the drift of the United States toward illiberalism. But Trump is not just a byproduct of this drift. He is its accelerant. And his actions are not rooted in some faulty concept of American greatness. They are rooted in personal rule, the logic of the caudillo, the autocrat, the mob boss.
Trump does not misunderstand power—he has simply substituted American power with Trumpian leverage.
He does not fail to recognize decline—he feeds off it.
He does not want the United States surrounded by strong allies. He wants it surrounded by feeble clients, desperate for his approval, afraid of his wrath.
In short: Trump doesn’t fail to see. He doesn’t care. To him, America greatness doesn’t matter.
And So the Water Rises
Vexler is right. We are adrift. NATO is compromised. The media is enabling. Democratic foundations are wobbling. And the only realistic way forward is to begin building the parallel architecture now, before the next rupture makes it impossible.
But let us not misread the enemy. Trump is not a misguided nationalist. He is an aspiring autocrat enabled by Putin who is actively sabotaging the institutions that bind free nations together—not because he miscalculates—but because those institutions are obstacles to Putin’s goals and to his own personal supremacy.
If we treat Trump like a patriot gone astray, we will lose.
We must treat him as what he is: a Russian-backed enemy of the alliance, of liberal democracy, and of America’s own structural power—so long as that power is not his to command.
Only from that clarity can a second vessel be built.
And only from that clarity will Europe, and perhaps what remains of the democratic West, survive.
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