Is there such a thing as nuance when it comes to Trump?

When Noam Chomsky says Donald Trump is being sensible about the war in Ukraine he’s trying to show he’s not blinded by partisanship, but Trump and his supporters won’t see it that way, writes Holly Baxter

Trump is very good at saying every line of argument, then doubling down on the one that seems best-fitted to the situation (Getty)

This Monday, US journalist Glenn Greenwald teased an interview with linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky on Twitter. Greenwald – who has written several books, contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations, co-founded nonprofit investigative news outlet The Intercept, and who also founded a law firm in the Nineties to support the First Amendment, i.e. freedom of speech, litigation – is no stranger to big-name interviews. With 1.8 million followers on Twitter, he’s also pretty much guaranteed to cause a publicity stink when he does them.

This time was no different. Sharing a few clips of his interview on Twitter, Greenwald showed Chomsky saying that the only “statesman of stature” who was being “sensible” about a solution to the war in Ukraine was Donald J Trump. Considering Chomsky’s past descriptions of Trump as “dangerous,” this seemed surprising. But he, like Greenwald, has always been a little confusing to people on the left. Greenwald’s concentration on freedom of speech and liberalism made him a darling of the left wing for some time – before he started appearing on Fox News and talking about pro-Bolsonaro marches in Brazil as havens for people who believed in freedom. His politics are confusing, and he resigned from The Intercept after a fallout with editors over a story about Hunter Biden in 2020 (in 2022, he seems to at least have been partially vindicated on that front.)

Similarly, Chomsky is a self-proclaimed socialist who echoes a lot of what the “Bernie Sanders left” loves to hear in the US: 9/11 was a result of American imperialism; the Republican Party has become “the most dangerous organisation in the world”. But his overly forgiving eye toward murderous, communist regimes – such as Pol Pot’s in Cambodia – has made him controversial. And now it seems he’s swung round to defending Trump, at least in one very important aspect.