The Situation: How Does Trump Stack Up Against Neville Chamberlain?

The Situation on Saturday proposed that Americans should stop being so cooperative with the ongoing assault on this country’s government, its national honor and dignity, its laws, its overseas alliances and influence, and its core values both domestically and overseas. 

Today, I want to say a few words—or, to be more precise, to quote a few words—in defense of Neville Chamberlain. 

Chamberlain is one of the 20th century’s figures of greatest contempt, having been spectacularly wrong about one of those questions that a leader of a great nation only has to face every few centuries: Should I let a malevolent figure like Adolf Hitler carve up an ally? Chamberlain said yes. History said no.

Analysts make Chamberlain, appeasement, and Munich references rather breezily these days, whenever a leader seeks to mollify, rather than confront, a dictator over territorial aggression. So it’s natural that after the Trump administration’s performance at—of all conferences—the Munich Security Conference and Trump’s and JD Vance’s behavior towards Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House the other day, the Chamberlain references are coming thick and fast.

Allow me to dissent: This is all very unfair to Chamberlain, who never matched for sheer malevolence what the Trump administration is doing now.

In support of this admittedly bold position, I appeal to Chamberlain’s old foe—the arch anti-appeaser Winston Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, after the appeasement policy was thoroughly discredited and Britain was at war.

On Nov. 12, 1940, Churchill spoke on the floor of the House of Commons to eulogize Chamberlain, who had died three days earlier. Given Churchill’s bitter dissent from the appeasement policy and his total vindication on the subject, one might not expect the thoroughly gracious tone of the eulogy. 

But Churchill opened his remarks by declaring that “the House has suffered a very grievous loss in the death of one of its most distinguished Members, and of a statesman and public servant who, during the best part of three memorable years, was first Minister of the Crown.” And he went on to say, “The fierce and bitter controversies which hung around him in recent times were hushed by the news of his illness and are silenced by his death.” 

Sure, it turned out that Chamberlain was wrong, Churchill acknowledged, but he might have been right:

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.
It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.

Let’s pause there.

Does anyone imagine that Trump and Vance are merely wrong, as Churchill asserts of Chamberlain—merely contradicted by events and deceived in their hopes? Churchill here was being generous but was also speaking from experience: Neither he nor Chamberlain knew in 1938 that Munich would be a disaster that would not bring “peace in our time.” Churchill suspected so. Chamberlain believed otherwise. Indeed, when Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich, he was seeking to avert a war that hadn’t happened yet. He didn’t have the example of, well, Neville Chamberlain at Munich to refer to.

The game Trump and Vance are playing, by contrast, is more like holding the Munich peace conference after the Germans had already invaded the Soviet Union, after the evidence of Hitler’s rapacious territorial ambitions were already beyond controversy. It is as though, three years into World War II, the British prime minister had sought to make a separate peace with Hitler based on Germany’s getting to keep the lebensraum it had grabbed for itself—and based on total impunity for his crimes. And it is as though, in doing so, he had actively sought to humiliate the Czechoslovak and Polish leaders in public with German television cameras running and British media excluded. This was a decision, quite different from Munich, actively to side with evil in the middle of a shooting war.

This brings me to Churchill’s discussion of Chamberlain’s motives, which are actually the most moving part of the speech. Because Churchill did not doubt that Chamberlain—for all that history remembers him as a fool—acted with the purest of good intentions:

What were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.

Trump and Vance also speak in the language of “peace.” I venture to guess, however, that not a single one of either man’s political opponents will testify to their sincerity in a eulogy.

The difference is not just that British politics in 1940 were gentler than our own today. The reason, rather, is that Trump and Vance are evidently not motivated by a sincere desire for peace. Trump, after all, has been shilling for Putin since long before the current war began. A sincere desire for peace generally doesn’t involve running a resource-extractive protection racket against the victim state. It doesn’t involve the gleeful public dressing down of a courageous leader in a fashion designed to humiliate. And it doesn’t involve systematic lying about who is doing what to whom.

I don’t pretend fully to understand Trump’s motives in his dealings with Ukraine. It’s part of the much larger mystery of his attitudes toward Putin, Russia, and autocrats in general, not to mention his contempt for democratic allies. He has hated Ukraine since the Russia investigation, about which he raged even the other day. And, of course, it was a call with Zelenskyy that got him impeached.

Whatever toxic brew of emotions and disinformation and extractive ambition and corruption make up his motives, one simply cannot argue with a straight face—as Churchill said of Chamberlain—that he is animated by “the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart.”

Because he’s not.

One reason Churchill believed so implicitly in Chamberlain’s good faith is that he saw how Chamberlain acted when history proved him wrong:

I had the singular experience of passing in a day from being one of his most prominent opponents and critics to being one of his principal lieutenants, and on another day of passing from serving under him to become the head of a Government of which, with perfect loyalty, he was content to be a member.

When it came time to put together the unity government that fought the war, Churchill reports, “he acted with that singleness of purpose and simplicity of conduct which at all times, and especially in great times, ought to be the ideal of us all.” In other words, when history proved Chamberlain wrong, he didn’t fight it. He didn’t double down. He brought his foes into government and then turned it over to them and served.

Can anyone imagine Trump behaving this way? History has already proved him wrong. And his response is to lie about it. He lies about who the dictator in the conflict is. He lies about the amount of money the United States has given Ukraine. He demands gratitude from the Ukrainian government for aid he is promising not to give. He insists that the whole war wouldn’t have happened on his watch and then asks to be thanked for an invasion that wouldn’t have happened in an imaginary world while he actively tolerates the one that is happening in the world in which we all live. No part of him shows the solemnity of Chamberlain in facing the consequences of his wrongness.

Finally, Churchill talks briefly about Chamberlain’s stolid facing of death in the period of his humiliation, when he was still serving as a minister in Churchill’s government. It is a portrait of selflessness in the face of duty and error: 

When he returned to duty a few weeks after a most severe operation, the bombardment of London and of the seat of Government had begun. I was a witness during that fortnight of his fortitude under the most grievous and painful bodily afflictions, and I can testify that, although physically only the wreck of a man, his nerve was unshaken and his remarkable mental faculties unimpaired.

Chamberlain, Churchill notes, on leaving government, “refused all honours. He would die like his father, plain Mr. Chamberlain.” And he “met the approach of death with a steady eye. If he grieved at all, it was that he could not be a spectator of our victory.” 

Will Trump refuse all honors when he leaves government? Will he meet death with a steady eye, having done everything he can, even facing grievous and painful bodily afflictions, to rectify the damage he is doing? 

If to ask such a question were not also to answer it, The Situation would not have to continue tomorrow.