Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has a blunt message for President Donald Trump: falling for Russian President Vladimir Putin's negotiating lines is doing the president no favors. In his latest Wall Street Journal column, Jenkins argued that any world leader hoping to look able-minded while making globe-spanning and potentially terrible decisions should avoid giving any sign of senility. The critique is notable for where it is coming from: the right-leaning Journal opinion pages, a reminder that the sharpest warnings about Trump's Russia posture are being voiced not only by Democrats but from within the president's own camp.

"My political advice to the president: Avoid giving signs of senility, an imminent hazard given his constant need to be on stage. Nothing would more quickly resolve the growing cognitive dissonance of his base than the idea that he's no longer the same Mr. Trump," Jenkins wrote. "Then even a Democratic impeachment won't save him."

That is not the persona Trump has been presenting in his doings with Putin, he argued. The Putin lines the president keeps falling for, Jenkins wrote, are making the nation's "very stable genius" look — at the very least — like something other than "a strategic genius."

"Speaking of senility, it will be time to take away gramps's phone if he falls for the Putin telemarketer line 'Donald, just get me a couple more small cities in the Donbas. I'll get you a Nobel Prize,'" Jenkins wrote. The Donbas reference points to the industrial region of eastern Ukraine where fighting has flared since 2014 and where Moscow has concentrated its grinding bid for territory since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The columnist suggested that critics who spend ten words decrying Trump's controversial diesel deal are probably investing more thought in their critique than Trump invested in accepting it. When it comes to pressing his "Russian buddy" to leave the Ukrainian neighbor it invaded, Trump is all "carrot" and no "stick," he said.

Yet Putin, Jenkins noted, knows his war effort is "out of gas." Russia's advance has been halted, the United States and Europe are already invested in Ukraine's defense, and Kyiv has "plenty of cards" as it destroys Russian refineries despite Trump's begging for them to stop — a campaign that has used long-range drones to strike the plants producing the fuel that powers Russia's military and generates export revenue. "Hopefully Mr. Trump isn't too addled to figure this out," Jenkins wrote.

In his view, Trump does not pick up on the obvious. The president wants lower diesel prices at all costs, even if that means flailing with the "strategic vacuity" of the diesel gambit. Diesel prices carry outsized political weight because the fuel underpins trucking, farming, and freight costs that feed quickly into everyday prices. And Trump cannot see very far into the future, Jenkins said, missing as he does the GOP souring all around him as the war drones on.

"Trump, until now, has been a bit cavalier in playing off the investigations to come from a Democratic Congress. He shouldn't be. Less implausible by the day is his own party turning on him in the last two years of his presidency. A good way of pushing it over the edge? His current circus of 'improving relations' with Russia by selling out Ukraine," Jenkins wrote. Whether that unease stays confined to opinion pages or hardens into primaries and congressional investigations is one of the threads to watch in the remainder of's term.

Trump, in Jenkins's telling, is a president who does not see more than a step or two ahead.

"I find myself joking with die-hard Russiagate believers that their theory of Trump treason explains only half of Mr. Trump's Russia actions. My theory explains 100 percent," Jenkins wrote. "Mr. Trump says and does whatever, in his cynical mind, he thinks will benefit Mr. Trump in the next five minutes. This is a universal theory of Trump behavior to which I have yet to find a significant exception."

The original report appeared on Alternet.